


The Aleph-Bet of Dean Winchester

by Nilozot



Category: Jewish Scripture & Legend, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Jewish, Angel/Human Relationships, Angels, Angst, Castiel Learns to be Human, Children in mild peril, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge, Fallen Angels, First Time, Gay Dean Winchester, Internalized Homophobia, Judaism, Kabbala, M/M, Magic, One Night Stands, Past Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Power Bottom!Dean, Team Free Will, background femslash and het
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-04 21:17:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12779691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nilozot/pseuds/Nilozot
Summary: Dean and Sam come from a long line of kabbalists — folk magicians with the knowledge to control both angels and demons, and coerce them into using their power for human purposes. But now the angel Castiel has come down from the heavenly realms, created a new body for himself, and asked Dean to accompany him on his other-worldly mission. Naturally Dean agrees to help, but as they travel together, both human and angel must navigate their forbidden attraction to each other.





	1. Malchut

**Author's Note:**

> I want to give a huge shout-out to my lovely beta Marie, who gave much advice and calmed the nerves. And also a massive thanks to the artist for this story, [throughxthexice](http://throughxthexice.tumblr.com), who is not only amazingly talented, but is also a true mensch. The art's embedded at the appropriate places in the story, but you can also check it out [here](http://throughxthexice.tumblr.com/post/167713105486)

_**Malchut** \- Kingship, sovereignty, service, actualization, humility, lowliness, the physical world. Reality as we know it._

 

“Thunderhead formation at five o’clock!” Sam’s voice crackled through the walkie-talkie. Dean bent his head around the frame of the reinforced jeep while swinging hard around to the right, and spotted the characteristic purplish sheen in a speck of the firmament above. Eleven minutes until the start of Shabbat. The angel, whichever one it was, was cutting it close.

“Got it, Sam,” he called. “She’s coming in at six mark fifteen mark two. South of the hill, you might want to get your butt over to that side for maximum visualization.”

One of the kids in the backseat giggled, and even as Dean accelerated towards the likely area of manifestation, he spared a second to glance back at his cargo. Four skinny, sickly little kids were crammed back there, all tucked in place with thick foam five-point harnesses, helmets, and sunglasses. One was bad enough off that he had an oxygen tube taped to his face, with the tank specially secured behind the passenger door. Every one of them had wide-eyed grins, which only got bigger as the vehicle swiveled and sped up. A good angel chase was likely to be the highlight of their very short lives.

“On it, headed up the hill,” Sam responded from the other jeep. “Window’s going to be tight with this one. This point in the week, the _malach_ can form a body in under ninety seconds.”

“I can see the clock, bro. She’s rotating towards the southwest so I’m heading on six mark twelve now. Almost under the funnel.”

“Stay safe,” Sam said, then on the cutoff began to mumble some Hebrew. A blessing, most likely; he didn’t mean for it to be broadcast.

Dean always appreciated the sentiment, even as he rolled his eyes at the prayer. For as often as the positive miracles occurred at these rare places on Earth where the boundaries between the Worlds were unusually thin, sometimes the opposite occurred. Sometimes, when the energies of creation were unleashed to give an ethereal creature a body and a shiny new animal soul, it fucked up those humans already on the ground instead of curing them. Dean and Sam had been chasing angels since they were ten years old, and had seen it go both ways.

The increasingly flashy clouds roiled away at an angle, so Dean swerved hard in that direction, nearly nicking one of the boxy sensor stations scattered across the bombed-out landscape. Not much lightening, so it thankfully wasn’t a hashmal they were dealing with, always a plus to avoid getting roasted right in the car. Possibly a saraph, given the orange shimmering of the clouds. Damn thing was coming in with a lot of power, which was good for his clients, bad for Sam’s ability to identify the angel with enough spare time to adjure. There was also a second kabbalist in a bus roaming in the same vicinity, so Dean had to keep an eye out for them as well. The other group didn’t have a lookout, though, as far as Dean could tell, so they were relying on a chance miracle instead of controlling the angel. Low rent amateurs, probably taking advantage of the poor and desperate.

“Class: Seraphim,” Sam announced, and Dean grinned. _Called_ it. Sam’s voice sounded less stressed and more in the zone, so he was likely parked now in a good position up on Mount Palmyra. “Order: Kanaphim.”

“Only narrows it down to like a thousand or so,” Dean muttered. “Come on, Sam, the thing’s gonna pop any second.”

The sky’s color rolled over from an orange-tinged rainbow to full-on fire right above them, an astonishing contrast to the dimming sun off to the west, with only a sliver still visible above the horizon. Dean slammed to a stop right before a creek, determining this was as close a place as he was likely to find. Even inside the vehicle he could feel the intense energy building up. Like the atmosphere itself was thunderous and heavy and could spark ignition at any moment.

“Glasses and seat belts stay on kids, no matter what happens,” Dean called out in warning. Then he flipped his own visor down — etched with Enochian wards and Psalm 91, because he was paranoid about the face — and rolled back the roof of the jeep.

The sulfurous air blasted all five of them like lava pouring into the car. There was no visible smoke, and yet it was hundred and twenty degrees and the air evinced an odd ozone thickness that scorched the lungs on inhalation. Dean judged it was a good place to stop, for they were near the limits of what four terminally ill youngsters could take. Their expressions had changed from glee to terror now, faced with the awe-inspiring power about to come raining down on their heads. One boy began chanting the _Mi Sheberach_ over and over, just as his parents had probably sung over him a thousand times. Another girl, apparently the realist of the group, went straight for the _Shema_.

Dean grabbed the CB transceiver and stood up on his seat, poking the upper half of his body out of the jeep. With his visor down and the sun setting it looked like night, but the landscape flickered as if illuminated by some giant bonfire. “We’re in the blast zone, Sam, I need the name.”

“Got it narrowed down to about a hundred. Working.”

 _Working_ in this case meant visually scanning the manifestation site while flipping back and forth with a couple of types of filters, trying to narrow down the spectrum of energies to one specific known angel. Most kabbalists at this stage would need a whole room of codexes to key the angel to its Name — and indeed there was such a library back in town, at Palmyra’s celestial observation registry — but Sam had it all crammed into his prodigious head. There were two hundred thousand known angels, and getting it wrong was worse than no Name at all. For if they adjured the wrong Name, if they tried to compel an angel not physically present right on top of the one that was manifesting, then not only might the embodied angel be injured, it would piss _both_ of them right off.

Only the aurora of the sun was still visible over the horizon. Only a minute or two until Shabbat, and the angel wouldn’t be able to create a body or its accompanying animal soul for a full day. The light just over the creek grew even brighter, blotting out what little was left of the sun. Dean could see weird unknown plants pushing up and flowering near the glow site, spurred by tremendous outpouring of creative sparks flowing in from Yetzirah, world of the angels.

“Abiogenesis at the site! The name, now!” Dean shouted into the handset. He risked a glance down at the kids, hoping to hell one of them hadn’t grown a second head or something. They had all quieted down, and were staring as one towards the light off the side of the jeep. Calm, accepting their fate, as the cancer kids always did at this moment. He’d never had a freakout from a child at this point, unlike some adults. Across the creek he could see petitioners from the bus, mostly elderly, pour outside and drop their knees and foreheads to the ground in devotion.

This close they could all feel the frustration and struggle and determination of the angel to cram itself into human form. The world of angels was said to be dominated by emotions, and they leaked out near the point of contact with the physical world. From his many years of experience, Dean could tell the angel was close to embodied. A touch of satisfaction seeped into the heady mix, indicating that the angel’s immediate assigned task was almost complete. He forced himself to stare hard straight into the fire, to see if he could spot a human shape.

“It’s, uh, either Cassiel, Castiel, or Casestiel. The colors’re too similar, Dean, I can’t tell which…”

“Give me your best guess,” Dean snapped back. The sun was hardly a sliver now. Thirty seconds at best. Fuck it, they were so alike that even if he used the wrong Name, the angel before him might well respond. Who knew how close the known Names were to the original revelation anyway.

“Castiel.”

At the word, Dean tipped his head back and began to bellow the adjurement. Zero finesse for singing at a time like this, he just needed to spit the words out.

“ _Ani mashbiakha et Castiel b’koach shemot Adonai…”_

Even as he spoke, he could see the form rising up in the fire, and Dean knew they were too late. He rattled off some of the sacred Names of God in support of their command — and the Winchesters had collected quite a few beyond the obvious ones in the Torah — but the angel was either going to flee or Shabbat would begin before he got to the actual command to heal the kids.

Even as he desperately tried to get through the spell, the sun dropped below the horizon. The metaphysical gates of the week slammed shut, and those of Shabbat opened up. The holy fire in front of them immediately diminished and snuffed out, for even the angels were forbidden from permanently changing matter on the sacred day. It would take more mojo than Dean had ever heard of to force an angel to heal on the day of rest, for they were famously incapable of disobeying God’s Word.

Oddly enough, the angel wasn’t yet whisking itself off to its destination. Dean trailed off the adjurement, as they had obviously failed in their mission, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could make out the same form of a upright body in the swirling dusty aftermath. It had chosen the form of a male, he could see. An inexplicably hot male in all his nakedness right in front of him, some gutter part of Dean’s brain supplied, and at that he forced himself to look away.

“Please, Castiel or Cassiel or Casestiel or whoever you are,” he said in common Hebrew, “they’re just kids, and they are going to die. Can’t you have mercy this one goddamned time?” The angel would receive the message. All three of them would, of course, since Name-dropping was great for express-service prayer, but theoretically only one of those was standing in front of him right now.

The angel tipped his head, but didn’t respond. Speech, a human attribute, was sometimes slow to integrate for the newly embodied, according to the lore. Dean had never personally seen one stick around so long after emanating through the firmament, though, so he was no expert on the frailties of angels adopting the human form. Its eyes were a freaky blue in this light, boring into him and none of the other observers, and almost seemed to want to communicate something straight to Dean himself. Then behind it — him — what looked like a blurry yet shimmering cloak unfurled and wrapped around him, covering him up. Some manifestation of his wings, although normally they couldn’t be seen in the physical world. And only then did he disappear.

“Is that it?” a high-pitched voice asked from the jeep. “Are we cured?”

“I dunno, kid,” Dean lied, and pulled himself back down into the driver’s seat. “Got to get you back to your doctors to tell.” In truth, he doubted any of them had been affected by a chance miracle, positive or negative. Over at the bus, closer to site of manifestation, one person was dancing in ecstatic joy at some cure. Another figure lay still on the ground, her friends sobbing over her form.

“But it’s Shabbat now. You’re not supposed to drive,” Oxygen Tank Kid protested.

Dean inwardly sighed. Religious kids were all equally annoying in their piety, and yes he included Sammy in that assessment.

“Unless you want to walk twenty miles or camp out with dancing grandpa over there, I’ve got to drive. I don’t think the Big Daddy in the Sky is going to strike you down for that.”

The kid frowned. In fact he was pinking up and looking a little healthier, although that was probably the adrenaline. Dean sighed again and told him the magic Shabbat-busting words. “Look, your lives are in danger if I don’t get you back to the hospital, right? There you go, rabbinic-approved driving.”

“Your brother doesn’t have anybody sick in his car, how come he’s driving back?” the kid pressed.

“Trust me, he’s probably torturing himself with the same question right about now,” Dean retorted. “Let’s get you back to dinner, and then you won’t have to think about the truly disgraceful observance levels of those awful kabbalists your parents illegally hired. You’re welcome for the angel, by the way.”

The kid squirmed in his seat, but also fitfully watched the darkening manifestation site, and the sacred hill behind it that had seen angels rain down since the days of Native Americans. Worth a half hour of Shabbat overrun to claim a piece of that history, Dean mused.

 

* * * * *

 

It didn’t take long to make it back to the pilgrim hamlet of Palmyra, New York, even with a short courtesy call to the naturalist station at the edge of the protected park. The science nerds there, ever fascinated with the boundaries between the physical and ethereal Worlds, enthusiastically concurred with Sam’s Seraphim/Kanaphim/Castiel identification. They were oddly giddy at the numbers their machines were spitting out in reaction to what apparently was an unusual sighting. With impatient kids in the car, he didn’t stick around to find out exactly what they were fussing over.

To Dean’s relief Sammy did join him at the hospital to break the ambiguous news to the clients’ parents instead of choosing to walk twenty miles, which he’d done more than once. Dean knew he felt responsible for the delay in identifying the angel, and thus the failure of the job. But it was ridiculous for Sam to beat himself up over it, and Dean told him so.

“Look, it was just too close to the start of Shabbat. Eleven minutes, come on, nobody could do it. I don’t know why that damned angel manifested so close to the wire either, its tail feathers practically got singed in the formation. We probably should have bailed at the thirty minute mark and gotten those kids home for a shot of kiddush wine.” They were walking to the home of the Turners, one of Dad’s remaining family friends, having left the vehicles at the hospital. Driving would have drawn attention to them in the neighborhoods anyway.

“You were right _there,_ Dean. You hardly needed another minute to complete the adjuration. I should have gone with my instincts and given you the damn Name.”

Dean shrugged. “If you weren’t sure, you weren’t sure. No sense in putting four kids at greater risk over a misidentified flicker. Although the science geeks ID’ed him as Castiel, too, so you were actually spot on.”

“Dad would’ve roasted me himself for taking so long.”

“Yeah, well, Dad’s gone, isn’t he? Dad is what happens when you play it fast and loose with bad-ass celestial beings. I wouldn’t want to be chained by an adjuration either. But you know they only give a shit about their marching orders, not us lowly plebe humans. You should’ve seen the look this one gave me. Creepy.”

“It looked at you? You saw it? In its new body?”

“Brand spankin’ new. Male, blue eyes. Could sorta see the wings, so that was cool.”

“Huh. I wonder what its mission is.”

“Cracking down on sinners and whores? Who knows.”

“You know, coming in so last on the sixth day like that, its form will be virtually perfect. More of Asiyah than Yetzirah. By the end of Shabbat, nobody’ll be able to tell it apart from the rest of us. Kind of an odd thought that a random stranger turning up at your door could be a malach.”

“Whatever, Bible Boy. How many angels pop down every week? A couple of dozen worldwide? They must go somewhere and do something. Probably just God’s courier service if you ask me. They don’t call them ‘messengers’ for nothing.”

They stopped their banter for the moment, having arrived at Rufus’ well-lit house. Rufus and Adirah Turner were some of the Winchesters’ oldest friends, having welcomed them into their home even back when Dean and Sam had been boys. John never had been much for socializing, but he and his own father’s reputation preceded him, and through their wandering childhood Sam and Dean retained friendly contacts all over the northeast. Jim and Missouri and Bobby and Josie, sometimes with their families in tow. Some were respectable pillars of the community, some were fringe magicians exploring the darker areas of a fractured world. Some were curious naturalists or Yetzirah chasers, some former victims of the demon world who needed assistance from the most unsavory characters, and a Winchester had answered the call. Some were acquired from Sam’s childhood begging of Shabbat hospitality, for the kid had always been good at working the system for a free hot meal. Some were simply John’s friends from before Mary had died.

The Turners were in the former client group; long ago, Sam and Dean’s grandfather Henry had rid their neighborhood of a lilit, a night demon that preyed on children and the weak. Rufus had been a young boy then, yet had never forgotten. He arranged his own family to be angel-adjacent, just to be on the safe side, but always extended a hand to the kabbalists as well. The Winchesters had a standing Shabbat invitation to stay over with the Turners whenever they were in the vicinity of Palmyra, which given Sam’s current preoccupation with angel hunting, was often.

In truth, if it weren’t for Sam, Dean would probably skip the Sabbath mumbo-jumbo and stay at a hostel downtown, where he could shower and flick lights on and off to his heart’s content. But a good meal would do both of them good, and probably the forced socialization too. He’d always been in danger of turning into a misanthropic version of Dad, not the least after John himself had passed away, and Sam was then still happily shacked up in blessed union with Jess and attending school, in Boston, far away from Dean’s decidedly impure influence. And then Jess too had died, spurring Sam’s “fuck cancer” quest. Everyone around them seemed to die, to the point that it was a minor miracle anyone invited them over at all.

Dean suspected they’d been cursed. Sam, on the other hand, reacted by doubling-down on his observance, a move that never ceased to be baffling to Dean no matter how often he witnessed it. If a spell or ritual or adjuration doesn’t work, you don’t just keep repeating it hoping for different results, not in Dean Winchester’s cold hard rational philosophy. He never encountered any sign that Jewish law wasn’t just another spell.

Through a window behind the front porch, Rufus had apparently spotted them. He came out and gave them a smile, and waved them in, despite the fact that dinner was likely long underway. Dean trailed Sam and walked in. For his brother, he’d socialize, but it wasn’t his preferred method of unwinding after several long days waiting on an angel sighting. He’d like a different sort of contact, but it was one that now would have to wait.

“Hey boys, good of you to make it,” Rufus said. His voice was crotchety, but his eyes betrayed the latent amusement. “Supper’s half cold, but you conveniently made it in time for libations.”

“Oh, hush Rufus, no one’s going hungry my table,” Adirah, Rufus’s wife, called from behind him. “Sam, Dean, come on in, you must be starving.”

She never failed to ply them with food, and Sam grinned as he bounded up the stairs. Dude could eat a whole lamb with his appetite worked up. Dean sauntered up more slowly, although he flashed their hosts an appreciative smile. Some part of his brain nagged him at times like these -- the cozy domesticity always seemed forced. That was all on him, though. He was the odd man out, the piece that didn’t belong, and was forced to fake it until he made it, which generally occurred after the third or fourth shot. Only on rare occasions would Dean say he truly relaxed, as if he were a member of the family, and not merely party crashers to be fawned over. Jess and Sam had managed it, in their tiny apartment in Boston, but that was over a year ago now. The distance of an age.

Despite his internal moanings he went in, and complimented the chef on her legitimately famous chicken and rice, and cooed over the grandkid, and harmlessly flirted with Naima, the youngest daughter still hanging out at the house, all as a young single guest was expected to do. They’d arrived late enough that Rufus’s older daughter and husband soon headed with the baby back to their home around the corner, and the rest of them settled into the dimly lit den for nightcaps and discussion.

“Did you guys chase an angel tonight?” Naima asked, her head lolling back on a cushion. At seventeen she wasn’t multiple l’chaim material, but nevertheless she appeared floppy and relaxed from the wine earlier, and her curiosity overrode her manners. “I still don’t know what you do when you catch one, just pray for its help? Throw yourself on the angel’s mercy?”

 _Not if we can help it,_ Dean thought. The use of an adjuration -- a spell forcing an angel to do a kabbalist’s bidding through skilled use of the Names -- was their most powerful weapon. But it was also their most controversial. Most folks did not approve of manipulating the letters for magical means -- although almost everyone did it at one time or another -- let alone the holy beings dedicated to their own inscrutable holy goals. It just wasn’t respectable.

“It’s a type of prayer, yes,” Sam said, rescuing him from awkwardness. “Secret prayers, passed down in certain families and schools. They control a lot of power, and must be used carefully, only under certain circumstances.”

“But why do they help you, like, over and above an ordinary prayer? Why isn’t the prayer of a sick person enough by themselves, but you helping a sick person gets them more?” Naima pressed. “Like if you ask Rafael to heal someone, is she more likely to do it for you than some random person?”

“An archangel like Rafael is too hot for us to handle,” Dean said. “Plus they don’t come down into our World too often. Got to catch ‘em when they’re weak and leaking Yetzirah all over the place.”

“What Dean means,” Sam interrupted, “is that we tap into energy from the other Worlds. It’s embedded in the way God created the universe. If He didn’t want to allow manipulation of the letters, why did He leave a backdoor to creation, and tell us how to use it?”

“How do you know it’s from God, though? Maybe you’re just exploiting a flaw in creation, like the demons.”

“Kid’s got you there, Sam,” Dean said with a grin. Sam squinted and held up a waved hand at him, as if to say, _puh-leeze._

“We know because there is a longstanding tradition that has been passed down to us, that the source of all received wisdom is through God, or God’s word through the angels or prophets,” Sam said. “Plus we know it actually works, and as an active force of good.”

“But can’t you do evil magic too, if you wanted?” Naima persisted. “Like curses, or a spell to make someone fall in love with you?”

“That’s enough, Naima,” Rufus said sharply. “We don’t need to be discussing black magic on the holy day.”

“Don’t worry, we wouldn’t do that stuff anyway,” Sam assured her.

The girl didn’t look convinced, and Dean could hardly blame her. The implied admission went unsaid: _But we could do it if we wanted to._

Which of course, they could. The line between witchcraft and practical kabbalah was often only a matter of intent. Make a demon dissipate, or make a demon attack a neighbor? An amulet to grant health, or take it away? Only a few tiny letters made the difference.

There was a knock at the door, and they all looked up, surprised to be receiving more quests at such late hour. Rufus got up to answer, and it turned to be a town crier, a Shabbat courier of messages. They could be sent as runners all over town to deliver news urgent enough that the sender didn’t want to wait a day to call, but also wasn’t life-and-death enough to pick up the phone on the Sabbath. The crier, a stout woman with amazingly beefed-up legs,  handed over a small rolled piece of paper to Sam, nodded at them, and backed out to run another message without pausing for breath.

“What’s it say, Sammy?” Dean asked.

“It’s from one of the parents at the hospital. It says every kid today is showing remarkable improvement. They can’t tell yet whether it’s full remission, but the parents are ecstatic.” Sam’s eyes shined bright at the stunning news.

“Wow,” Dean said. “We didn’t even finish the adj...I mean prayer,” he amended, at Rufus’s glare. “What do think, lucky break on a random miracle?”

“I guess,” Sam said. “You were right in the zone, and the angel did manage to manifest, right?”

“Mostly, yeah. The other kabbalist caught a miracle too.”

“Must be it.”

“That is _so_ cool,” Naima said. “You guys have the coolest job ever.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s not go get any ideas,” Rufus warned. “The pay is terrible, you can hardly show your face in respectable society, and almost every kabbalist I know died at an early age, may their names be remembered. Still not hold my breath for these two either,” he added.

“Gee, what a vote of confidence,” Dean said. “You give Dad this speech too?”

“He’s not here, is he?” Rufus countered softly. “I owe you, Winchesters. I and many other people are grateful you’re here on this rock. But I would never approve of my own kin to do what you do.”

“Humpf,” said Dean. “On that note, I’m taking the family inheritance in the form of your guest bedroom. You coming, Sammy?”

Dean half-expected him to stay up much later, arguing textual analysis with Rufus into the night, but suddenly his brother looked exhausted. Overwhelmed, as he sometimes looked after either victory or defeat. If they failed Sam felt guilty, but if they succeeded he still got no peace. For the thought always haunted his brother: Why could they save strangers, but they couldn’t save Jess or Dad?

Why didn’t the angels answer when they really needed it?

 


	2. Yesod

_**Yesod** \- Foundation, cleaving to truth, harmony, coherent knowledge, truth, acceptance, bonding, attachment, desire, pleasure._

Dean didn’t actually go to sleep with everybody else. Two hours later the whole household was out with only the automatic lights to keep them company, or at least everyone was tucked into their quiet dark rooms. Sam was certainly snoring away on the other guest bed, his long body contorted to cram itself on the small surface and a book flopped over next to him. With only the dim night light to guide him, Dean slipped up out of bed and threw back on his jacket, jeans and shoes. As he padded down the hallway he could hear quiet laughter and rocking from Adirah and Rufus’s room. Well, they weren’t the only ones with the intention to enjoy the pleasures of Shabbat. Dean smiled and shuffled past, trying not make noise as he slipped out the front door.

The bar he was headed for was over two miles away, so he set a brisk pace. It was one of those underground places where you had to know the location in advance to even find it, operating tonight semi-legally with prepaid tabs and scrip over the Sabbath. The activities of the bar’s clients was just as much a gray zone as its employees. Technically it had been a few years since homosexual activity had been decriminalized, but that didn’t mean they’d been embraced by society or the morality police. And as a response, technically none of the bar’s denizens would be engaging in questionable behavior on the premises. Just a bunch of men hanging out and drinking, nothing hinky about that. The low key, fly-under-the-radar nature of this particular bar was one reason Dean liked it; he never did prefer the more flashy activist joints, which more likely than not provoked complaints about their wanton halachic violations and, well, _attention._ The last thing Dean wanted.

He bounded down some rusty stairs to the basement of some boring insurance front, below the secondary-level tenement apartments for mostly single single men. Another perk of the place, since he couldn’t exactly pick someone up and bring them back to Rufus’s. Palmyra attracted its share of mystics and miracle seekers and naturalists, a good number of them rotating in and out as the lure of the destructive angels wore off. The turnover turned what otherwise was a sleepy health-pilgrimage village into a hotspot of casual illicit behavior.

Dean gave a chin-up to the bartender as he entered, then crossed over to a dark table in the opposing corner overlooking most of the room. He’d been in enough that the bartender knew what he wanted, both as far as drinks went and the other clientele. Unprompted, the bartender brought him a tall glass of decent local beer, and Dean dropped a wooden chit into the “donation” box on the table. Nothing passed hands, technically no money exchanged. They visited Rufus so often that Dean might as well run a tab, but he preferred the flexibility of prepaid scrip.

“Heard there was an angel sighting right at sunset,” the bartender suddenly said. Dean looked up at him, surprised, for the dude normally wasn’t one for unprovoked chitchat.

“I … heard that too,” he replied, cautiously.

“Powerful one, so late in the week. Apparently there’s some possibility that it didn’t get fully incorporated. Rare.”

“Sucks for the angel, but he’ll be all better by Sunday,” Dean said. He wondered if this was getting to a point, or if it was just that some of the naturalists came in tonight and babbled.

“The authorities were perturbed enough to ask around about strangers. Some profane kabbalists may have distracted the angel from timely completion of its sacred mission. Or so I heard.”

“Oh.” Not cause for serious concern, although Dean appreciated the tip. He and Sam had bribed their way out of trouble from the sanctimonious purity police before. An amulet here, a customized curse there. Everybody loved a bit of magic, when push came to shove. Plus, _cancer kids,_ it wasn’t like they were ordering the angel to make a rich man richer.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out another chit, and dropped in the donation box. “Impious bastards, the lot of them. Any idea if the authorities care enough about these scoundrel kabbalists to track them down before Shabbat is over?”

“Unlikely,” the bartender said, and Dean relaxed. “But they might do well not to wander the streets all night. The police have their description.”

“Ah. That sounds advisable.” He gave the guy a firm nod of thanks, who then wandered back to the bar.

At that, Dean leaned back and picked up his glass for a sip. It could be a long night before he was comfortable making his way back to Rufus and Adirah’s, so he may as well settle in. He scanned the open bar, absorbing all possible marks at a glance. The likeliest prospect popped right out at him, but he put that one aside for last. He’d adopted the policy of examining the room in order from maximum pug face to hottest - a mercurial habit, to be sure, but one that gave Dean passing familiarity with half the gay dudes in the Genesee Valley.

First his eyes flickered over a couple of groups of regulars, playing pool, playing cards. The pool table guys were always in here on Friday nights and never seemed interested in picking anyone up, so Dean assumed they lived together in some ignoble house of bachelors and fucked each other on the regular, and just really liked to play pool. The card table guys were more of a varied bunch, and sometimes Dean did enjoy joining one of their tables and shamelessly flirting, in the absence of other prospects. Unfortunately, the card sharks tended to show evidence of being married, often not even bothering to take off their rings before schlepping down here. The dudes present tonight were no exception.

Dean held a firm red line on married guys. It wasn’t the immorality per se — hello, the whole room was a walking Leviticus violation — but it busted Dean’s personal ethics code of Do No Harm To Innocent Civilians. He really didn’t care what perversions individuals got up to, but you don’t bring unsuspecting third parties into it. And since he had no way of confirming bullshit lines about “arrangements,” he stuck to men with enough sense to avoid the chuppah in the first place. The trouble was that the married men clustered in the low-key, attention-avoiding bars too, thus dramatically lowering Dean’s pickup pool.

He turned his attention to the bar itself, which tended to be the domain of drifters, nervous newbies, and misanthropes. Two he immediately wrote off as married, one was older than Dean cared for, one already so smashed he was swaying on the barstool. Drunk Dude and one of the marrieds were both already eyeing Dean appreciatively, and he gave them each a cold bored stare back, hoping to deter them from stumbling over.

Finally, having completed due diligence, Dean began to watch the most attractive person in the room.

The kid was sitting at another lonely table, his nose buried in a book written in formal Hebrew, not the vernacular. He had olive skin and long eyelashes, and wavy overgrown hair that served to accentuate the filthy kippah on top of his head. Probably wore it so often he’d forgotten it was up there. Mentally Dean pegged him as a “kid,” but that was a misnomer, as the guy looked to be only a couple of years younger than him, mid-twenties likely. But he seemed younger than that in demeanor, a bit naive, ignoring his surroundings a little too much.

An ex-yeshiva kid, Dean decided, slowly making the moves to break free. Exactly at the sweet spot of malleability that Dean liked. He stared at the guy’s soft hands for a while, trying to suss out ring marks. It was hard to tell. He wasn’t getting a guilty cheating vibe, though.

The dude must have sensed Dean was watching him, for he finally looked up from reading and glanced around the room. Dean didn’t react as he noticed him, but calmly sat back and looked him over, gauging both the guy’s interest and his willingness to express that interest. Dean’s only movement was a finger slowly circling the top of his glass.

He stared at Dean long enough for it to get awkward for the cruising uninitiated, and for a second Dean thought he might lose his nerve and flee the bar altogether. He was just about the break the logjam himself and get up, when the kid took a breath, closed his book, and mustered up the courage to walk over. Dean couldn’t help giving a small smile for encouragement. Good boy.

“Is, um, this seat taken?” the guy asked, then shirked back a little, as if he already regretted his word choices.

Dean gave him another amused look and gestured for the empty chair next to him. “Open bar, no reason not to be friendly. I’m Dean,” he added, as the guy sank into the seat, and reached out to shake hands.

“Aaron. Thanks.”

Dean didn’t bother to be subtle about the handshake. He ran his thumb over the top of the guy’s fingers and let it drift, and let the other guy feel up his own hand and his rune ring on the index. They lingered long enough that he could sense the bartender getting antsy about the “no touching” rule. The guy drank in the simple contact, and Dean had to be the one to let go.

“This your first time in here?” Dean asked.

“Oh. No. I’ve, uh, been in town for a couple of weeks. I’m starting at the nursing school after the holidays.” He ran a hand through his hair and readjusted the kippah as a nervous tic. “I’m still not used to places like this, but I’ve been in before. Have, um, you? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

“I’m in and out of town a lot,” Dean said enigmatically. “Nice to find a new face. We don’t bite.”

“Right. Ha.”

He was fidgeting with both hands along the spine of his book, obviously trying to find something to occupy them. On impulse Dean reached out and stroked his ringless left hand with the barest touch of his fingertip, risking the wrath of the bartender over a tiny bit of contact. The guy’s pretty brown eyes fluttered shut.

“Listen, Aaron, before we get much further, can I ask you a direct question?” He withdrew his hand and took a swig of beer, as Aaron opened his eyes and nodded. “You don’t have a pretty wife and three point five kids sleeping alone somewhere while you sneak out? Because I can’t stand…”

He was about to say _religious_ _hypocrites,_ but the guy interrupted him with an outraged look before he could get that far. “What? No. I would never…” He took a breath and composed himself to start again. “Look, I know this looks bad, da’ati guy in here on Shabbat and all that. I don’t know what to do with myself half the time either. I had a wife. Syracuse. She’s remarried already. I moved here to avoid shaming her and my daughter and my parents any further.”

Dean’s entire stance softened. “Sorry, man. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. I just like to winnow out the cheaters, is all.”

“I never cheated. Never. I never touched anyone, I was so afraid of the yetzer hara. But sometimes it was just too much, and I had these magazines, just to look at, right? It’s not an aveira if you never do anything. But I didn’t hide them well enough.”

Dean couldn’t help reaching out and stroking the guy’s distraught face, even though he knew it might get them both kicked out. It had been a long time since he’d met someone more in need of physical contact, and quite frankly Dean was _dying_ to pull the poor bastard towards him and start making out right then and there. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he murmured. “Come on, hang out with me, I’ll show you some _real_ aveiras.”

Aaron laughed, and it broke up the tension, as Dean intended. “Aveirot, not aveiras.”

“I knew that. I just chose not to say it.”

“NO! TOUCHING!” the bartender’s voice suddenly rolled out. “You both know the rules. Get out and get a room if you need some personal moments.”

Dean dropped his hand and looked Aaron in the face. “Tell me you’ve got a room nearby, because I don’t.”

“It’s right upstairs.”

* * * * *

They huffed up three flights of stairs without touching again, and Dean could feel the tension building back up. He wondered if Aaron had even so much as kissed a guy since his marriage broke up. Well, they would get a lot further than that tonight if Dean had anything to say about it, but it might require a fair bit of coaxing to get a religious guy — even one half off the wagon — to go that far. Dean did pride himself on his talent at sexual persuasion, though, and they had all night.

The room itself was spare and devoid of color, as adrift as its occupant. A bed, a kitchenette, a few scattered books, a wash basin next to the bed. He’d lit his own Shabbat candles, before heading downstairs to sit out the evening waiting for a stray connection to someone, anyone. And honestly, Dean could relate, minus the religious detritus. Even though Dean had long ago come to terms with the fact that he was a hopeless sexual deviant, it didn’t make it any less lonely. It didn’t mean there wasn’t a small part of him that longed for boring domestic respectability, for kids to play around with, for the reliable companionship of someone who was _not_ a controlling father or grieving brother. For Rufus’s picture-perfect home.

But the person in front him demonstrated the lie in that fantasy. You had to choose, family or bodily integrity, and in the end that was no choice at all. It was never going to get any better than random hookups in sterile rooms, for people like Aaron and him.

“Sorry, I know it’s not much,” Aaron was saying. “I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that this is supposed to be, you know, home, not some miserable dorm room somewhere.”

Dean just looked at him, then took three steps in to deliberately invade his personal space. “Not here for the decor, man.” He twisted Aaron’s shirt and yanked him forward, and bent down to catch him in a kiss. It took Aaron a couple of seconds to adjust to the sudden movement, but then he did, opening up, wrapping a hand around the back of Dean’s neck, leaning into him. The kissing was tentative at first, but then that too turned sweet and enthusiastic.Like he was letting go under Dean’s skilled hands, exactly as Dean liked.

He migrated his hands down to the bottom of Aaron’s shirt, and while keeping the kiss going as long as possible, dragged both the shirt and tallit katan up and off in one fluid movement. Aaron followed suit, peeling off the multiple layers Dean sported even now in the summer. He wrapped his arms around the other man, to pull in that warmth chest to chest, when Aaron abruptly broke off with a slight gasp. Dean opened his eyes, suddenly remembering that he hadn’t given any warning as to what was under the shirt.

“What…what is all that?” Aaron stuttered. “I mean…why? Or how, how did you get someone to…?”

“I see my body has yet again rendered a man speechless.” Dean left him and flopped on the bed, propping himself half up on his elbow. “They’re tattoos, dude. First ones I had done in South America, then found an underground guy in Boston.”

“I know they’re tattoos, but, um, I’ve never seen them on a live person before. In, you know, a Jewish country.”

“More common than you think in certain groups, we just don’t go around flashing them to religious people,” Dean said dryly. But he knew he was going to have to get this guy over the psychological hurdle in order to get properly laid, so he waved Aaron over. “Come on. I’ll give you a tour. You can touch them, it’s not like they’re catching.”

Aaron migrated over and knelt on the floor next to the low-lying bed, staring at Dean’s chest with obvious fascination. “Oh, wow, the patterns are made up of letters. Like calligraphy artwork.” He ran his fingers down a swirling column of words, trying to make out a phrase. The biggest motif on Dean’s chest was a version of Etz Chaim, the tree of life — roots in heaven, living leaves on the earth, all made up of an intricate swirling line of tiny text. Abstract designs of shorter bursts of text made up the background of the tree down to his waist. The arms sported geometric designs: interlacing circles, magic squares of repeating letters.

“Calligram, they call it. The words themselves have all the power, I just thought the designs looked cool.”

“Power,” Aaron muttered. Then he began to read off the tree: “ _Ki malachav y’tzaveh lach lishmarecha b’chol d’rechecha._ This is the ninety-first psalm. _He will order His angels to follow you wherever you go.”_ He looked up into Dean’s eyes, blinking. “This is the anti-demon psalm.”

“Hey, it’s useful for adjurations too. That angel bit is great. But yeah, demons and spirits are our bread and butter.” Or at least they were before Dad died, and Sam came back with his save-the-cancer-kids quest.

Aaron pulled his hand off Dean’s chest like he’d been burned. “You’re a practical kabbalist.”

“Not like it’s an insult or anything.” The derogatory _practical_ bit did make him want to roll his eyes, however. There were kabbalists and kabbalists, of course. Plenty of holy men who spent their days fasting and praying and meditating, and not doing a damn thing for real people, as far as Dean was concerned. Why did magic exist if nobody was going to use it to make the world a slightly less shitty place?

“But I thought that kabbalists were con men, taking advantage of people’s superstitions. Why bother doing _this_ to yourself if you’re just going to…”

“Because it works,” Dean interrupted. “Come on, man, you live in Palmyra. You can go out and see the angels yourself, if you’ve got the balls. You can feel the world crack open when they come through, and the energy from _somewhere else_ burns through the air. Even your pure not-practical kabbalists understand that there’s _power_ everywhere around us, because some part of the other worlds touches ours everywhere. I know they taught you that the letters are the keys to creation, so why is this so hard to believe?”

He took Aaron’s hand and snaked it back up onto his chest, right over his heart. “What does this part say?”

“It’s a nonsense word,” Aaron whispered.

“You know it’s not. It’s not a word at all. It’s one of the Names.”

The Names of God, that is, not the angels. In theory, with the right Name, a kabbalist could adjure God himself and compel him to wield the power of creation. Perhaps that was just another way of expressing control over the universe, like science gone mad. Dean didn’t know; everything beyond the angels and the fringes of Yetzirah was way above his pay grade.

“Do you believe in God?” Aaron asked softly.

_Shit, this is getting too heavy for a pickup,_ Dean thought. “Sure I do. He’s an asshole.”

“I don’t get it,” Aaron said, ignoring the asshole bit. He didn’t let his fingertips up off of Dean’s skin, but continued to stroke it, as if magnetically attracted. “If you know the power of the letters and Names, and you believe in God, why don’t you follow Jewish law?”

Dean could only let out a bitter laugh. “For the same reason you brought me up to this empty room to fuck you, instead of living at home with your family. What has halacha done for people like us? You know, I’ve got a brother who went down the straight road. You know what he got for all his faith and obedience? A dead wife at age twenty-two.”

He put both his hands over the top of Aaron’s, over his heart, then cupped it and pulled it up to rub against his lips. “Maybe the angels can fix how broken we are, but the laws of men and rabbis sure as hell can’t. But we don’t have to obey like an angel, either. Free will, man. We’re not _compelled_ to do anything. Why not take that as a gift, and enjoy life? If that happens to be compatible with 3000-year-old hearsay from Sinai, great. If not, I’ve got other things to care about.” Dean leaned in, still holding Aaron’s hand, inches from the other man’s face. “Speaking of, I’ve got to ask, were you actually planning on getting laid here or what? Because if you’re going to be a deviant, may as well start with the best.”

Dean didn’t bother to wait for yet another equivocal bleating in response, but pulled the other man forward to capture him in a kiss. Smothering him to a degree, so that Aaron wouldn’t be able to breathe or think straight, or in the least contemplate his self-imposed cock-block. Fuck ambivalence and hesitation, shame and guilt. Fuck all the hangups that reduced a delicious body to laws in a book or letters on a page. Dean intimately knew those symbols had magic beyond etched black marks, but made it a life choice to ignore them when convenient. Skin too held its own power.

He let go of Aaron’s hand and clasped the back of his neck, to pull him in even tighter. But the kissing he kept soft and gentle, coaxing rather than domineering, letting him explore. Dean never knew with these baby-gay pickups what the other guy’s experience level was. Maybe he’d had a drunken make-out session with some other repressed yeshiva boy at some point, maybe not. Maybe he’d sucked it up and given his wife a good-faith effort, maybe not. But in any case it was unlikely to have been languid and free, two people brought together by mutual attraction, and nothing more serious hanging on the encounter. Rare was the guy that didn’t respond with enthusiasm to the open opportunity, and Aaron was no exception. He ran his fingers up into Dean’s hair and then ran that same hand down the back of Dean’s back. They again pressed their chests together, unable to hold back from slavishly increasing their physical touch.

They pawed at each other’s faces and chests for a good long while before Dean began to roam south. He let Aaron sink against him, almost holding him up as Aaron curled his arms around his back, and Dean ground his cock against the other man’s. Then he followed it up by snaking his own hand down, cupping him hard enough to elicit  moan.

“C’mon. Bed. Lose the pants,” Dean muttered into his ear.

Aaron pulled back for a moment and gave him a dazed —almost drunken, if he didn’t know that the guy had been nursing soda — expression, while Dean continued to methodically feel him up, worming his way past the zipper now. “You are just so…”

“Awesome?” Dean supplied. “I know.”

“Really freakishly beautiful,” breathed Aaron.

“Oh my God, dude. What am I, a wilting flower?” On that note, he shoved Aaron backwards, so he fell on the bed. Privately Dean always thought his face had a weird scrunched look, but he was reliably informed by both sexes that he was attractive, so he went with it.

Aaron rolled back on the bed, still looking glassy-eyed. Dean dropped what was left of his own clothes, and stood next to bed over him, watching his face for signs of the overload of nervousness or fear that sometimes emanated from the newbies. But now there was only lust.

“I mean it. Beautiful,” Aaron said, softly but with less hesitation. Before Dean could retort with appropriate snark, he pushed himself forward on the bed and wrapped his lips around Dean’s cock.

This was the moment Dean loved, and not just for the exquisite turn-on of a sloppy blow job. It was the moment he converted someone to think about or for themselves, to consider nothing more than a back and forth pleasure. More than any individual act, it was a rare, heady combination of vulnerability and the malleability of a naive but willing partner. Maybe Dean just enjoyed ordering people around, but he also secretly reveled in his new partner's’ sense of adventurous discovery.

He let Aaron inexpertly go on a for few moments, but eventually decided it was time to push. He gently nudged Aaron away from him, then lay down on the bed skin to skin, and leaned over for a languid kiss. When he got the point where he figured the other guy was seeing stars, again he broke it off.

“What do you think you’re really up for here, man.” It wasn’t actually a question. More of a statement to ease him into Dean’s proposal. “If all you want to do is make out all night and jerk or suck each other off, I’m fine with that. But I’m also fine with other activities.”

He let it hang there until Aaron got the hint. The guy’s eyes got even wider and he said, “You mean you want to…”

“Swear to God, dude, if the words ‘lie with a man as if with a woman’ pass your lips, I’m outta here.”

“But it’s what you’re talking about, right?”

Dean could tell the poor horny bastard was both repelled and entranced. He actually bit his lip. It was a tiny bit fetching. Dean put his hands on Aaron’s bare shoulders to level with him. “Listen. No pressure. But you’ve got a live heretic on your hands here, so may as well take advantage. At the rate you were hesitantly reading Torah in a gay bar, it might be whole months before you find someone else willing to take it up the ass.”

Aaron blinked. “Wait, you want to bottom? I thought you wanted to fuck me.”

“Yeah. Everyone always thinks that. I’ve got a look, apparently. But good on you, knowing what ‘bottoming’ is. At least you’ve been paying attention to the pool guys.”

For the second time since they’d met, Aaron looked positively speechless. “But…why?” he finally managed to spit out. “I mean I get the appeal of blowjobs, and handjobs, and generally, uh, self jobs, but what’s fun so about being, um, the receiver?”

“Because I like it,” Dean said simply. He rummaged his jeans off the floor for the small tube of lube he had hidden in there, just in case this gambit was successful. Or even not, that was fun too. “What else are we here for? It’s possible that you might like it too, but you’re too uptight to try it for yourself today, newbie.” He bent over again and caught Aaron by the lips, not letting him get another ridiculous word in edgewise, or ideally, too much thought either. Anal had too many negative associations for these ex-religious guys, too much dude-on-dude Biblical baggage. Occasionally it was a plus for the few that went completely over the deep end when they broke off faith, and started breaking Jewish law right and left. But for most it was one of the last taboos to crumble.

Aaron melted into the kiss, and Dean decided there was hope after all. He tugged him down onto the bed, on top of him at first, letting Aaron feel the length of his body and the hardness of his cock. They ground against each other, panting, until Dean was close to the point of no return. Somewhere in there he’d managed to get some of the lube between them, on Aaron’s solid rock, and the slipperiness of that revved him up too.

“God, just try it,” Dean panted. “Don’t you want to know? Let it go of all the bullshit.” He opened his legs and pulled them far back, inviting him.

Aaron roughly tried to slide in. He didn’t really have sufficient lube smeared on him, but it was enough of a victory that Dean willed himself to relax. The guy’s girth made it mildly hurt for a second, but Dean grabbed his butt and willed him on, and Aaron surged forward. And it was so _satisfying_. Half the time Dean didn’t have a true answer for why he liked it, but it boiled down to something primal beyond orgasm, to be filled and stretched and pounded and fucked. He craned his neck up to give Aaron a frenzied kiss, sliding one hand up to his head to hold him to his own face, while using the other to urge on his hips.

Aaron’s eyes were tightly shut, but he kept up with the kissing, and with coaxing began to get into it. He rocked forward, hard, and Dean knew neither one of them was going to last long. He rarely could hold it in this state, although his ass probably thanked him for his lack of staying power. And Aaron did come right after him, pushing in hard right at the tail end of Dean’s own orgasm.

Afterward, Aaron flopped a head to one side, but still lay half on top of him, getting used to all the touch. Dean kept something of a lock on his hair, but stroked his head as well.

“See, baby, sex can be fun, not just a chore twice a week,” Dean murmured, to Aaron’s amazed and dazed face. “Ever had so much fun?”

“No,” Aaron gasped with wide-eyed certainty, and buried his lips in Dean’s neck.

  



	3. Netzach

_**Netzach** \- Dominance, endurance, self-confidence, victory, satisfaction, parenting, giving. Eternity._

Dean never knew what supernal sense caused him to open his eyes. It was four am and they’d only been asleep for an hour at best. Perhaps it was the years of chasing angels and dissipating demons that allowed him to detect the charge in the room, the subtle shift in energy towards red-hot embers and electric spark. Or maybe it was the dream he was having right before waking up: He was floating in a completely dark yet comforting space, not even a room but an infinite expanse, when a hand reached out and cradled him. Maybe Dean was small in the dream, or the hand impossibly large, a blanket wrapping him in warmth and love. Then the love was replaced with urgency and purpose, and he swore he heard his name being called, although nothing was audible in that great space which thinned the words and letters and intent out to meaninglessness, and the hand squeezed…

Dean opened his eyes. A man was standing up in the room not four feet from the bed, watching the two of them sleep.

It took Dean longer than he’d care to admit to register that the man was not some intruder whom he should properly smash a lampshade over the head — not a man at all — but the angel that he’d watched form a body for itself only a few hours before. The half-curled wings were still visible behind him, shimmering black and impossible to focus the eyes on, like an invisible silk net that could only been seen when rain reflected off it in certain directions. The angel had managed to find clothes, and was improbably dressed like a traveling vacuum salesman, right down to a dowdy business raincoat and a lopsided tie.

Very slowly Dean sat up in the bed, leaving a blanket pooled in his lap over his bare junk, for reasons that were entirely psychological. Ironic, now _he_ was the naked one. He’d had the lesson practically beaten into him since childhood not to startle otherworldly beings, for their reactions in the physical world were not always predictable. Nevertheless he gave Aaron a sharp nudge with a knee, hoping the guy wouldn’t freak out on him.

“Wha…s’Shabbat, lemme sleep in,” Aaron slurred.

“Dude, there’s an Angel of the Lord standing in your living room,” Dean said, not breaking his gaze off the angel in question.

It didn’t react, but Aaron did. His eyes flew open, and, upon taking in the wings and the weirdly cool stare coming from the angel’s blue eyes, immediately flung himself on the floor in prostration and began babbling a prayer. Dean was momentarily distracted by his quite fine ass wavering in the air, but decided it really wasn’t the time.

“Don’t mind him, he’s never seen an embodied angel before,” Dean said. Honestly, he’d never seen an embodied _malach_ this close up before either, that he knew of at least. Usually when they adjured, it was to corral the lower angels, and done from afar. After Shabbat it’d be able to hide the wings, and look like any other guy in the street.

The angel continued to stare, long enough that Dean began to wonder if it hadn’t had a chance to develop speech in its abrupt transformation. But then it — he — opened his mouth, and slowly some gravelly words spilled out.

“Dean Winchester, son of John, son of Henry,” he said.

“You’ve found him,” Dean replied with a fake casual air. “Can I, uh, help you?” In the background Aaron was increasing his speed-muttering, and Dean wondered if he should throw a blanket over him or something.

“I have been tasked with a mission in the realm you call Asiyah. The Hosts of Heaven request your cooperation.”

“Oh, really.” Dean stood up and rummaged up his jeans and a shirt off the floor. Obviously the angel wasn’t planning on smiting them in the bed where all that sweet, sweet sinning had occurred, and probably didn’t have the mojo to destroy anything on the Sabbath anyway. He had wiggle room to get decent. “Why me?”

“I do not know,” the angel said. His voice still sounded raw and unpracticed. “I was merely instructed that Dean Winchester, son of John, would be necessary to complete my task, and to seek you out.”

“Huh. Well, let me think about that, _Castiel._ ”

He dropped the Name with precise ancient pronunciation, as close to the original revelation as the Winchester branch of kabbalists knew. The angel’s reaction was instantaneous: His wings flared out, encompassing the entire room, flicking both Dean and Aaron with unnatural energy. Aaron suddenly stopped his urgent recitation, and looked up. The angel’s face changed too, from placid determination to actual anger.

“ _Do. Not. Abuse. My. Name_ ,” Castiel spit out. Then he seemed to remember he was surrounded by non-obedient human beings with complete free will, and amended, “I request that you do not use the Name. It is, as you say, for Official Use Only.”

Dean suppressed a weak laugh. But the angel was right, best not to piss him off, and to only deploy that weapon if they really needed it. Use of the Name was the only control they had over a being with almost unimaginable power. Or maybe they should call it a leash. “Fine, fine, I’ll give you an informal non-Name name. Okay? If you’re going to pass as human, we’ve got to call you something.”

“That is acceptable. We must go now.”

Dean was just about to loudly object to the presumption of his cooperation in whatever hare-brained scheme Heaven had come up with, when Aaron spoke up from the floor.

“Wait. Please, _malach_ , fix me. I beg you.”

Castiel looked in Aaron’s direction for the first time, as if he’d just noticed him. “You are not injured. There is nothing to repair.”

“No, I mean _fix_ me. Fix this, so I never want to do this again.” He waved a hand between the bed and Dean.

Dean rolled his eyes. “Dude, no, I didn’t mean that literally,” he muttered.

Castiel’s face deepened into a confused frown. “You are referring to the sexual relations you engaged in earlier this evening, forbidden by the agreement of your nation.”

“ _Yes,”_ Aaron breathed.

“And you wish to change your desires in accordance with your will?”

“Uh, I think so, yeah,” Aaron said.

“I do not possess the ability to change either man’s will or man’s desires. It is a minor biological error. You are not harmed by it.”

“ _Minor?”_ Aaron exclaimed, at exactly the same time Dean said, “ _Error?”_

Castiel just looked at them, as if they were not communicating at all. “Asiyah is filled with cracks and errors. Its imperfections are what allows you freedom and thought. I would not concern yourself with this particular one. It has no reflection in the Worlds above, or in your World to Come.”

Aaron appeared thunderstruck by this revelation. Dean sat down on the bed to tie on his boots.

“It doesn’t feel like freedom,” Aaron finally ventured. “More like a chain.”

“You do not know true chains,” Castiel said. Then he looked at Dean, as if the matter was over and forgotten. “Are you ready to go, Dean Winchester?”

“Just call me Dean. I don’t need my whole name advertised all over the place, just like you.” He finished the last boot lace with a firm tug. “I’m not helping with any celestial mission without my brother, so your first pit stop had better be Sam Winchester, son of John, son of Henry, currently snoozing away in the home of one Rufus Turner, son of Fuck I Forgot.”

Castiel frowned again. “I was not instructed to be accompanied by Sam Winchester, only Dean Winchester.”

“Tough luck, we are a package deal. You want me, you’ve got to take him too, Casta…Cas. Plus he’s an awesome kabbalist, way better than me, so, you know, that’s helpful.”

“Very well, if you insist.”

Dean nodded and stood up, wondering how the whole angel transport thing was going to work with a human in tow. Aaron was still sitting on the floor, staring at the two of them with either awe or horror, Dean couldn’t tell which. Dean didn’t say goodbye, but just gave him a shrug and a half smile, as if to say, _Yup, this is my life. Practical kabbalah for the win, bitch._

Then the angel rested a hand on his shoulder, and the shimmering impossible wings uncurled and enveloped them. For an instant Dean felt he was being smothering in a blanket of sizzling energy, and then everything went black.

 

* * * * *

 

The angel didn’t whisk them straight to Sam’s bedroom as Dean expected — which would have been either hilarious or mortifying or both given point of view, depending on Sam’s state at five in the morning — but outside the Turner’s small bungalow. Dean blinked at suddenly being in the chilly outdoors, despite the dim cracking of dawn. Maybe the angel couldn’t enter a home uninvited, legendary vampyr-style.

Dean swiveled towards the front porch to retrieve the hidden key at the front door, but then paused and looked at Castiel. “Tell me something straight, angel. Did you cure those kids last night?”

Cas shirked his gaze back, looking almost…embarrassed, Dean was interested to note. “There was enough residual creative energy to comply with your request,” he said.

“But, why? You angels are always such sticklers for Shabbat. It’s, like, practically physics.”

“I felt it would facilitate your cooperation in this mission,” Cas said.

 _Bullshit,_ Dean thought. An angel would willingly disobey the literal Creator of the universe? Unlikely. But Dean wasn’t going to question this bit of good fortune too strongly.

“Thanks,” Dean said instead. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Their errors were…significant. But still correctable.”

Dean considered retorting why then the angels didn’t come down and cure all the innocent cancer kids, or prevent horrible illnesses in the first place, but decided not to push it. Probably too early for a _why does evil exist?_ discussion with a holy being. He just nodded, and jerked his head towards the house. “Come on. Gotta wake Sam up.”

Inside, Sam took in the wispy wings with considerable aplomb, despite being woken up from a dead sleep. “Is that…?”

“Yup. Our very own malach. Asked for me by _name.”_

Sam looked at Cas, then back at Dean. “He doesn’t look too pissed off. That’s good?”

“I was instructed to accompany Dean Winchester for this mission,” Cas intoned. “You are merely ‘along for the ride,’ I believe is the expression.”

“See? All those pleading prayers, good for language acquisition,” Dean said. Sam rolled his eyes.

“What exactly is your mission? What can we help you with?” Sam asked, overly politely.

“Two angels are missing, after having embodied themselves in your physical realm of Asiyah. I may require assistance in locating them.”

“Missing? How in the hell do two angels go missing?” Dean asked. “Don’t you have express service tracking through their Names?”

“Yeah, I don’t get that either,” Sam said. “I thought the seraphim had souls emanating from Yetzirah and Beriah. Like humans, only, you know, more. Since every point in the Worlds are connected, so can’t you just locate their souls up there, and see where they are down here?”

“Their connection with the upper Worlds has been greatly reduced,” Cas said. He paused, then added, “To that of a human. There should be fleeting connections when they sleep, but even this has been hidden from us somehow.”

Dean and Sam shot each other a look. _Human? Sleep?_ Since when do embodied angels need to sleep and dream?

“So, maybe they’ve been trapped in their bodies somehow?” Sam said slowly. “Do you think this is the work of people, Cas? Is someone, uh, forcing the angels to do their bidding?”

A delicate subject, given _their_ occupation. But Dad has always taught them to have the utmost respect for the beings they adjured, both demons and angels, for they were intimately connected with the very essence of Creation. Everything and everyone had limits and required balance, and the Winchesters would be fools to disrupt that balance to an inordinate degree.

Cas seemed unperturbed by the implication, or he didn’t notice it. “I am not certain.”

“Well, if they’re embodied here in Asiyah right now, we could try and adjure them. After Shabbat I mean. But you’d need to give us the Names,” Sam said.

Dean shook his head. “I dunno, Sam, if someone’s put a permanent bind on not one but two angels, they’ve got more mojo than us. A lot more. That’s some serious dark magic right there, way beyond anything we’ve ever fooled with.”

“Then we’ll need positive magic to counter it,” Sam shot back. “We should take Cas to Torat Or.”

Dean groaned. “Your old rabbinical college? Come on, Sam, they’re not going to get their hands dirty with a couple of practical kabbalists. You had to lie through your teeth to even get in there.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dean. I know Rabbi Abulafia, and he knows me. They are true tzaddikim and hasidim. Of course they would help an angel with his mission.”

Dean rolled his eyes, and glanced over at Cas to gauge his reaction. It appeared to be utter non-reaction; he was staring slightly off into space. Probably consulting the Angel Encyclopedia to find out what “Torat Or” was.

But then Cas seemed to regain his focus from the whatever celestial communication, and looked straight at them. “I would prefer to track them through physical means, at least at first. The efforts of the Rabbis can be utilized if other avenues fail.”

Again Dean shot Sam a look, who based on his quizzical expression was thinking the same thing as him: This whole scenario was sketchy as fuck. An angel goes to the effort of coming down to Earth, hooks up with two kabbalists, and doesn’t want to use magic to fulfill his mission? What were they to Cas here, tour guides to humanity?

“You are skeptical,” Cas continued. “I have, as you say, a lead. The prophet is informed of every angel visitation by Name and location. We may inquire from him their last whereabouts.”

 _You don’t even know where they came down,_ thought Dean. A suspicion was beginning to form in his mind, but he wanted to get Sam alone and run the idea by him before tipping the angel off.

“There are no prophets in this generation, that we know of at least,” Sam was saying.

“I know more than you,” Cas replied. “There are always prophets and scribes, to hear and record the Lord’s words and His use of the Names. Our actions are but extensions of Him.”

Then, before they could object, or ask any more questions on _that_ cryptic pronouncement, again the wings reached out and curled around both of them, and all three of them winked out. This time, however, Dean didn’t experience a lost nothingness, and then blink back into existence in a disconcerting new place. The motion, the _flying_ , was somehow experienced, as if they were passing _through_ every object, person, trees, whole mountains in order to move from Point A to Point B.

When they did come to a stop and emerged from the dizzying edge of firmament, they were standing on a steep grassy hill, overlooking an entire valley of neat green trimmed bushes. The air was warm but dry, unlike New York in the summer, where the humidity tended to hit you like a wet sock. Dean rotated around to get the full panoramic view. On one side of the hill, with more of steep slope was covered in a patch of extremely tall trees, and off in the distance he could make out a mountain peak — no, two, one further away. A village was nestled down by a river flowing through the valley, the architecture indicating to Dean’s untrained eye that they were somewhere in Chinese territory. Whether mainland or their East Huaxia colonies on the west coast of the continent, he couldn’t tell.

“Down there,” Cas said, and pointed to the village.

“You couldn’t just speed us to the exact spot?” Dean complained. “I mean, what’s a thousand more feet gonna hurt.”

“Yes, I could, but this will give the prophet advance warning of our arrival.”

Sam grinned at his laziness, and started tromping down the hill.

They were met by a small contingent in the waist-high field, just outside the cluster of houses. To Dean’s surprise the group was led by what appeared to be a short teenage Asian kid. The rest of his posse was a motley band, with assorted facial features, skin colors and dress from across the world. One guy did have a kippah, so apparently at one of the many branches of branch of Judaism was indeed aware of the current generation’s prophet.

“Shalom, Castiel,” the kid said, and bowed his head. Dean blinked at the Hebrew. He wondered if it was for the angel, for their benefit, or if he used it simply because it was a commonly known language.

This time Cas didn’t react to use of his full Name, but instead tipped his head low in return. “Hello, Kevin Tran, honored prophet and scribe.”

“You know,” Dean commented, without invitation, “I always sort of pictured the prophets as old dudes with long flowing beards and elaborate wood staffs to bang their pronouncements into the ground. Who voted in a kid as prophet?”

“Hey, it’s your God,” Kevin Tran shot back. “I was your average thirteen-year-old neurotic naturalist until I started hearing voices in my head one day. Turns out when one prophet dies and enters the World to Come, another is activated to hear the divine lectures. Previous experience not required.” He turned back to Cas. “Who are your friends, angel?”

“Dean and Sam Winchester.” He didn’t elaborate further, and Dean and his brother didn’t volunteer anything either.

Kevin nodded towards them in polite acknowledgment, then turned back to Cas. “And what can I do to assist the Heavenly Hosts today?”

“I request the location of embodiment of two other angels. East Coast of the continent, and we believe they took the form of females.”

If Kevin was surprised that the angels couldn’t locate two of their own, he didn’t show it. “Names?” he asked.

Cas hesitated so long, Dean thought he was going to hedge. If he said the names, Dean realized, the angels in question would very likely hear. “Anael and Anayel,” he finally said.

Sam leaned over to Dean to whisper, “Classification, Seraphim. Order, Kanaphim. Same regiment.” The same Order as Cas, and as close to siblings and blood brothers as angels could get.

Kevin nodded. “I remember. They did not cross over in one of the usual holy places. The opposite in fact.” He paused, and Cas waited patiently for judgment. “I have reason to believe they do not want you to locate them. Why should I prioritize the mission of one angel over the wishes of two?”

“You know my mission is pure, and theirs is not.”

“I’m going to give you a piece of advice, Castiel. That’s a terrible reason to give to a human. Half of people would give it to the other angels just to check your smart ass at the door.”

“I like this kid,” Dean declared.

“But it is the truth,” Cas protested.

“You can tell the truth and still not rub our faces in it, messenger. Ask your friends about social niceties, that’s what they’re here for.” He waved a hand of dismissal. “However, I’ve received another _request_ indicating your cause is righteous. I hope you don’t abuse that. Your wayward angels came down in Salem, two hours outside of Boston, two years ago in our world’s time. They left as much Heaven behind as they could. Maybe think about not dragging Heaven back to them.”

“I have no choice,” Cas said.

“You’re in and of Asiyah now. Of course you have a choice.”

Cas stared at him blankly, uncomprehending, and Kevin waved a hand in dismissal. “You’ll get it eventually, angel. All of you do. Consider that’s maybe the real reason why you are here.” He looked over at Dean and Sam. “Stay awhile. Your day of rest doesn’t end for many hours. May as well enjoy some tea, and the sunset.”

“We’d be honored,” Sam said, before Dean could get a word in edgewise.

Cas, likewise, wasn’t keen on lounging about. “We should continue to move and pursue leads.”

“Your angels have been down here for two years, Cas. Another few hours isn’t going to make a difference.”

Dean nodded, although for a different reason entirely. “Yeah, how often do we get to hang out in a tea house with a prophet in East Huaxia? Your mission isn’t going anywhere, Cas, especially outside Boston.” This last was a lie, as folks within a Shabbat-observant region would be more likely to entertain angel on the sabbath even than a regular weekday. But Dean wanted to run some things by Sam before running all over creation in pursuit of the angel’s cryptic mission.

They were escorted by Kevin and the group through the village proper up to a spacious pavilion ensconced in some kind of forested shrine, surrounded by lush green vines and the tallest trees Dean had ever seen. The trees were cleared along a linear path out of one end toward the west, where Dean imagined the ocean would be, but only another mountain range was visible. They plopped down into chairs as the prophet served tea. Cas looked stiff as he awkwardly lowered himself down, as if his muscles had no idea how to sit, and shifted antsily at the unnecessary delay.

It took a few minutes to get his brother alone enough to whisper a few theories about their current situation.

“We could have gone on,” Sam murmured. “You didn’t have to sit around all afternoon with me.”

Dean shrugged, taking that as an admission of suspicion. “So you agree, this is not on the up and up.”

“Yeah. I mean, I’m sure it is on Cas’s end, but there’s no saying he can’t lie to us, or withhold information. At least we have the Names now.”

“Human names. A demon-infested landing site. Wills and missions of their own. Doesn’t sound very angelic to me. Do you think…they no longer want to be angels?”

An expression of scandal flashed across Sam’s face, but then he seriously considered it. “By definition, if they no longer follow orders, are they automatically fallen?”

“You’re the one with a source library crammed into your head, you tell me.. But the thought crossed my mind that Cas’s mission is to make them to come back, or maybe just smite them to smithereens.”

“How about we phrase that as ‘convince them’ for now,” Sam shot back. “We don’t know if angels can harm other angels, let alone destroy each other.”

“They’re slaves, Sam. They do what they’re ordered to do. Heaven isn’t all lovingkindness and lollipops. He could kill us too if we get in the way.”

“You mean me, maybe. He seems to like you.”

Dean rolled his eyes, but then sneaked a glance over at the angel. He was sitting with his back ramrod straight, legs open in imitation of the prophet next to him, who was grinning and sipping from a cup. Cas too reached over and took a swig of the dark liquid, and immediately frowned at either the heat or taste and let it dribble out. The whole scene was oddly endearing, and even Kevin laughed.

“He’s like a toddler-level human,” Dean muttered. “Let’s just roll with it for now. We can always hold back Mr. Lightningbolt with the Name if we have to.”

“Don’t you think we should give an angel the benefit of the doubt?” Sam asked.

“Sam, if I wasn’t giving him the benefit of the doubt, I wouldn’t have agreed to this fool’s run of a mission. Unpaid.”

“Dean, we’ve been chasing angels for years. No way you would have given up the opportunity to see one in action, up close,” Sam countered, and wandered back to sit down.

“Not that up close,” Dean said, but it was largely a protest to himself.

  



	4. Hod

_**Hod** \- Glory, grandeur, submission, sincerity, empathy, thankfulness, child, receiving, gratitude, self-abnegation, surrender._

As Shabbat ended, Castiel’s eye-straining wings seemed to disappear. Blinked out, just as the sun dipped below the horizon. The last flaw in Cas’s apparent human body was masked over, and for a few seconds, his face filled with peace. Like his new body was complete now, and Dean privately thought the light and relaxing afternoon and burden off made him look even more beautiful. Dean often let himself appreciate beauty, for a few indulgent seconds at least, before dismissing the notion as inappropriate even by his pervert standards. An angel with fearsome power devoted to hunting other angels deemed too decadent to live? He would never be a pickup, and Dean needed to squash that impulse right where it began.

They were sitting in chairs watching the sun wane in the west. An ocean was just over that horizon, but it wasn’t visible beyond a ridge of mountains. Dean had to admit that both the view and the weather here in tea country was glorious. Cool and fresh and green, even with summer’s heat.

“Your Sabbath is complete,” Cas intoned. Relaxation over, apparently. “Where in this ‘Salem’ do you think we should start?”

“Salem’s a town, Cas, not a foreign land. Kind of known for its demon activity, to be honest, we’ve been down there lots of times.”

“They may have chosen that deliberately. Both because it would be difficult for others to follow, and because the it would be easier to sever ties with the other Worlds.”

“I’ve got to ask, but it’s been two years,” Sam said. “What makes you think you can pick up their trail again after so long? I mean, they’re angels, can’t they just transport themselves anywhere on Earth they want?”

“Perhaps,” Cas said. “But one them, at least, wanted to be human. They may have warped their own souls enough to leave behind the wings.”

Silence followed that, as Dean and Sam absorbed the implications. “So, you’re saying they would limp around on foot like vagabond humans? That’s some hard-core dedication to the cause, I’ve got say.”

“It also leaves them oddly vulnerable,” Sam said. “They couldn’t get away very quickly if cornered.”

“Yes, but it is much more desirable for hiding,” Cas explained. “Every time we move, it reverberates through Yetzirah. Every communication through means other than speech, others can hear. By mimicking human abilities, they blend in with the human population. So again, with your familiarity of the area, where should we start to track them?”

Dean sighed. “Yeah, we have an idea where two runaways who look like females might go first. Trouble is, they don’t like us very much.”

“Why not? They know of you?”

“Our scurrilous reputation precedes us. No, for starters, it’s because they’re not too fond of men. Kind of my polar opposites, in fact,” Dean chuckled. Sam shot him the patented annoyed _come on, Dean_ look, which made Dean laugh more.

Sam turned to Cas. “The real reason is because our mother was one of them, and she left to marry our Dad, and to have us, a couple of boys. I don’t think they ever forgave Mary Campbell for becoming Mary Winchester. We’ve never made it past the front gate.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Cas asked.

“The Cult of Miriam,” both Dean and Sam said together.

* * * * *

They gave their regards to the prophet for his hospitality, and Cas whisked them off. Once the name Miriam had been mentioned, he seemed to know the exact location to zero in on.

“The prophetess Miriam’s devotees are known,” he explained, just outside the cold blue gates of the Cult’s compound. “They pray in her Name, although her honored soul, like every other human long after death, has moved beyond their hearing. Even the prophets and scribes.”

“Beyond what?” Sam asked. “One of these days, Cas, you’ll have to give me a primer on what happens to the various aspects of the soul after death. Plenty of arguments over that one, let me tell you. Reincarnation? Purgatory? Some corner of Beriah that serves as Heaven, basking in the glory of the Lord for all eternity?”

“Sounds like Sheol to me,” Dean muttered.

“It is not for the living to know exactly what happens to the dead, merely that the souls are not destroyed,” Cas said.

“We’ve done spirit possession. Dad was practically a master at chasing off ibburim. Obviously whatever’s supposed to happen, it doesn’t always go right,” Dean said.

“There are always … exceptions.”

 _Flaws you mean,_ Dean thought. _All of Creation is flawed, and everyone in it._ Even the angels, he now knew. Something in that was comforting.

Cas turned his attention to the gates, which appeared to be welded into pure stone. Out of the rocks water trickled down to two clear pools, which cleverly drained off to the sides of the gate. It was supposed to represent the well that followed the Israelites in the exodus from Egypt, miraculously sustained by Miriam’s merit.

“Cock-haters, the lot of them. I’ll never get the appeal,” Dean declared.

“Maybe that’s because you’re not, in fact, a woman,” Sam said. “I mean, I’ve sat through some ridiculous lectures about how men can’t possibly pray in the presence of women, HaShem forbid female singing, blah, blah, blah. Not too surprising that some women would turn it around on us.”

“Yeah, this is more than mumbling to God three times a day. It’s, like, a _lifestyle._ Without men. How do they even manage to reproduce themselves?”

“Pretty sure the hard part of that is on their end,” Sam said, amused. “So what are we doing here, Cas? You want to knock on the door, break us in, what?”

“Someone is approaching. We will talk.”

Inside the gate, a young blond woman, barely into her twenties, walked up to the front entrance. “Can I help you fellas?” she said, leaning a hand out through the bars. “Getting a little late for a social call.”

“We’d like to speak to the Shofeta, please. It’s an urgent matter,” Sam said.

“Dudes, it’s nearly one in the morning. How about making an appointment and coming back at a civilized hour?”

“Oh right, the time change, Shabbat ended hours ago here,” Sam muttered.

The woman squinted at him in the dim moonlight, then Dean. “I know you two, don’t I,” she said. “You’ve tried to get in before, looking for information about your mother.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, sauntering up to the gate. He remembered her now too, the daughter of the leader of the cult. Last time they’d been by — the time they’d been told to buzz off — she was barely out of school, but still managed to bat her eyes at him. Hey, Dean couldn’t help it if he was pretty, and he wasn’t above flirting with the opposite sex to get his way, either. “This is something totally different, though. See that guy over there? An angel. Swear to God.”

She looked Cas over a bit skeptically. “Oh, really.”

“He’s on a mission, see,” Dean continued. “And he really needs to speak with your mother, if you don’t mind.”

“Oooooh. Well. If you say he’s on a mission then…”

Dean leaned into the gate, flashing her a smile.

“Fuck right off then. Really, guys, an angel? Like no one’s ever used that line before.”

Dean was about to retort something totally biting and witty when, in his peripheral vision, Cas abruptly blinked out. Half a second later he reappeared inside the gate, right next to the girl. Who, to her credit, swallowed her understandable scream.

“I request that you wake up your Shofeta. Please,” Cas said pleasantly.

“Jo. Step back from the _malach_.”

A middle-aged woman with brown hair and intense black eyes stepped out from the shadows near the rock waterfall, flanked by two female guards. Dean recognized her from the research they’d done to case the place three years ago: the current Cult of Miriam leader and Judge on High, Ellen Harvelle.

“Mother,” Jo said, “how’d you know to…”

“Gut feeling. The air felt strange tonight. We’ve seen this before.” She turned towards Cas, and bowed her head, not unlike the same motion of respect from Prophet Tran. “Castiel. We are honored by your visit, but ask that you and your companions not travel beyond the guesthouse, at least while you are in male form.”

Dean made a gargling noise that could be construed as self-strangulation. Shofeta Harvelle ignored him.

“How are you informed of my Name?” Cas asked.

“We keep an ear to the ground of angel sightings within, oh, a thousand miles or so. Not that it should matter to you, except it often does. You do tend to shift over to our World near your holy assignment. Palmyra, this time.”

Cas nodded, noncommittal on the point of his embodiment. “I only require information. Then we will leave,” he informed her.

“I may or may not be able to help you, malach. I’ve many obligations and vows, including even of others of your kind. But we will always entertain requests.”

“Two Earth years ago, there were two angels who took human bodies near here. Female form, and we believe they may have acquired human names. Since you monitor angel sightings, perhaps you heard of them.” Dean would have sworn that last bit was sarcasm, if he didn’t know deadpan Castiel.

“Perhaps,” the Shofeta. “And perhaps two female _former_ angels who took refuge with us would not want to be revealed.”

“I do not intend to harm them. My mission is to convince them to return to the comfort in obedience to the Lord.”

Harvelle visibly recoiled at the last word. “You stand here wearing the body of a warrior, and dare espouse peace. Pay attention, daughter, how the angels can lie without lying. If you manifested as a woman I might believe you, but this chosen form tells us all we need to know.”

“Hey now, what’s with all this judging a book by its cover?” Dean asked, angry himself at her unprovoked rage. “Just because he’s in the form of a dude, doesn’t mean his mission is automatically evil or up to no good.”

“You don’t know what you are speaking of, _boy._ Do you think that this form is random? That it’s just a body and the choice is meaningless? The female angels embark on mission of healing and life, while the males represent death and destruction. He is not here to help his angel friends return to the light. He is here to kill the child. He is exactly why they had to run.”

“What. Child.” Dean spit out.

“Ask him, kabbalist. He knows. See if you too can detect the lies.” She paused, staring at his face, as if seeing him as an individual for the first time. “You are Mary’s oldest, are you not. You are very much like her. So much is the pity.”

“Pity of what, that she rejected your crazy cult?” Dean asked.

“No.” The Shofeta smiled at him, not at all kindly. “Pity that you weren’t a girl. She would have returned to us then, you know. The blood of an old kabbalist lineage, we haven’t had one of those in a while. But it’s always difficult when the first born is male. Not everyone can let them go.”

She muttered some words, too faintly for Dean to note them for later, and blew into her hand. In that instant, Cas flicked out and reappeared back outside the gate. An adjuration of some kind, and even though Dean wanted to shout down these infernal nutcases, the professional part of him was privately impressed by the spell’s elegance.

“Go now, malach, and do not return. The angels you seek were here, and now they are not. They did not tell us their destination, so there’s no point in an interrogation.”

“Isn’t there anything else you can tell us about our mother, before we go?” Sam said, almost pleading. He never knew Mary, not even as still flashes of memory. What Dean thought he remembered, but now questioned. The loss still ate at Sam, and decades later, he was never properly healed.

“I’m sorry, child. All I can tell you is that she chose you over us, and paid the price for it. At the time she was my friend, and I did not expect that decision. Obviously I didn’t really know her either. Perhaps that is comforting.”

“Really not,” Dean said.

Miriam’s Judge shrugged and turned her back on them, and walked away.

  
  



	5. Gevurah

_**Gevurah** -Strength, severity, restraint, limits, control, law, judgment, fear, awe._

“Talk to us, Cas,” Sam said, pacing back and forth in the generic room. “What was she going on about with the ‘child’?”

They’d retreated to an old inn Sam was familiar with over in Boston, one that stayed open late on Saturday night to accommodate post-Shabbat travelers. Castiel didn’t see the need to stop for the night, but Dean managed to convince him that mere mortals couldn’t keep going 24/7, even with a nice break hanging out with a prophet in the middle. Plus Dean himself had hardly gotten any sleep the night before, and would need at least three cups of coffee to prevent his head from hitting the pillow.

Maddeningly, though, Sam wanted to talk.

“Is she right?” he asked. “Are you here to do more than convince the other angels to return? What aren’t you telling us about this situation?”

Cas was sitting back on a comfortable but dumpy two-seat couch. Dean didn’t think he’d seen the angel sit, ever, so far. “My duty is to retrieve my siblings from Asiyah, which requires leaving their bodies behind. They are seraphim, existing since the beginning of time, and continuing to exist until God ends all the Worlds. We cannot be killed, except through His will. None of this is a lie.”

“Okay, but what kid was the Shofeta talking about?”

Cas sighed and leaned back. To Dean he seemed exhausted, which oddly made him look more human than ever. “It is unfortunate to receive confirmation that a child exists. If it is what I think it is, measures may need to be taken. It is not human. It is an abomination.”

“What, did one of them go out and get themselves knocked up? Can female angels do that? Angel/human hybrids are a big no-no, think I read that somewhere,” Dean said.

“You mean… Bereshit?” Sam sarcastically replied. “Genesis six talks about the ‘sons of God and man,’ and there are tons of old midrashic references too. Enoch, Targum Yerushalmi, Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, scraps from both the Qumran and Nazarene sects, all mention the fallen angels and their offspring. Basically a whole lot of apocalypse going around in between the second and third Temples.”

“Yeah, yeah, smart-ass,” Dean said. “But that was near the beginning of Creation. You’d think whichever angels were going to go south would have done it back then. Sorry, Cas, but you all seem to be an obedient lot nowadays.”

“Angels, by definition, exist to serve the will of Lord,” Cas said wearily, blinking from the sofa. “Our current constitution does not allow for disobedience. That error was rectified eons ago. Now our souls are closely bound to Beriah and Atzilut, and thus the Lord himself.”

“And yet here we are, chasing two runaways,” Dean said. “You were the one telling me about how all of nature is flawed. Can’t the angels have flaws too? Especially down here in dirty Asiyah, about as far from Atzilut as you can get.”

“Perhaps,” Cas muttered, and closed his eyes.

“You look like you need to get some sleep, man,” Dean told him.

“Sleep? Angels do not require sleep.”

“Uh, your baby human body maybe does. I know this body need some too, so how about we all get a few hours of shut-eye, hit the good rabbis up in the morning.”

“I do not require sleep,” Cas repeated stubbornly. “Sleep and dreaming are human characteristics. This body only requires occasional rest for optimal performance.”

“Fine, Cas, whatever. Why don’t you stretch out on that couch, close your eyes, and don’t sleep for a few hours?”

“That is acceptable.” Even without taking off the coat, he tipped himself backwards and swung his legs around and folded them up for too-small couch. His eyes never opened.

Dean shook his head and flashed a smile at Sam, but his brother didn’t return it. Instead Sam was watching Cas with a worried sort of frown on his face.

“This whole thing still seems hinky, Dean,” Sam muttered under his breath, so as not wake up the sleeping not-sleeping angel.

“Kind of surprised you’re the skeptic, Sam. He’s a malach I saw cross over and form with my own eyes. Definitely an angel, not a demon. Shouldn’t we give the righteousness of his mission the benefit of the doubt? ” Dean flopped on one of the beds in the room and crossed his arms, fully clothed. They had to be up again in four hours, he didn’t even see the point in stripping down.

“I guess. Maybe Rabbi Abulafia will see something that I don’t.”

He began to murmur the Shema, barely audible so Dean in theory could sleep too. Dean, though, always listened before he drifted off, whenever Sam was around. It was funny that this ended up being their ritual, because Dean was the one who taught him the Shema, way back when Sam was barely a toddler and Dean hardly old enough to mother him. Even as a little kid Dean never had a drive for punctilious observance, but Dad had told him to do it as he no longer had the energy to do it himself, and Dean knew other parents said it too. It was what you did at bedtime with a two-year-old, and Dean had done his best as far as Sam was concerned. Ironic that it had stuck with his brother, and not with himself.

Dimly as he drifted off, Dean remembered that their mother hadn’t sung the Shema at all, but a completely different prayer. He’d never told a soul that fact, and never would.

* * * * *

A few hours later Sam’s alarm began shrilling, and Dean dragged his eyes open. The rabbis and students of Torat Or only allowed themselves to modestly sleep in on Shabbat, so on Sunday they were due to assemble for prayer at the obscene seven o’clock hour. Off to one side he could hear Sam reciting yet another set of prayers and blessings while washing his hands. Cas was still laying on the couch, but now his eyes were open too, and despite the crumpled clothing he looked more relaxed and refreshed.

“So, how’d that unsleeping go, Cas?” he asked, when Sam was done with his obligatory penitence.

“The rest was… surprisingly helpful,” Cas said. “The process of forming a body and acquiring an animating soul was more difficult than I expected. It’s been many centuries since I came down to Asiyah.”

“You zoomed in with, like, seconds to spare, and I kind of interrupted you in the act. So, uh, sorry about that?”

Cas sat up and gave Dean a baffled look. “Your actions had no effect on me, so there is no need for forgiveness.” His hair was standing in a giant cowlick in the  back due to being squashed, and Dean suppressed the urge to wander over there and smooth it down with his hand. What was wrong with him?

“Right. Well, we wanted to give you a big thank you for helping the kids after Shabbat started. You didn’t have to do that, we know.”

Now Cas’s eyes shifted, as if he wanted to avoid the subject. “There were residual creative sparks, which I simply moved outwards. It was not specifically directed, but I am happy the children received benefit.”

“Really?” Sam said. “Dean’s prayer didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“So you heard that, huh,” Dean said.

“Dude, your mic was open. Every impious word.”

“The children were praying before Dean spoke, just not using my Name. So I was already quite aware of your presence.”

Dean couldn’t help noticing that Cas avoided the question.

Sam may have noticed too, but he latched onto a different inconsistency in the story. “Didn’t you need these residual sparks to finish the body and hide your wings? I mean, it seems like it must have been a pretty deliberate thing to cure all four of them.”

“It was permitted,” Cas said firmly, in a tone that told them they weren’t going to get anything more out of him on the topic. He turned to Sam and said, “It is almost time for your morning prayers. They are already beginning to recite in nearby parts of the community.”

“Doesn’t it bug you to hear the exact same prayers over and over again from millions of people every day?” Dean asked.

“No. It is a comfort to know that the nations of the world continue in their path. If the prayers ever stopped, we would know something has gone horribly wrong.”

“They start Shacharit in ten, we’d better get going,” Sam said.

“You do not wish to transport directly there?” Cas asked.

“I think it’d be better to walk in like normal people, rather than springing the whole angel thing on them at once. But if you guys want to come a little later, fine by me.”

In the end they all walked. Dean privately thought it was a good idea for Cas to stretch his legs, but didn’t say so out loud.

The school occupied a modest four-story brick building originating from a centuries-old expansion of the city. Inside the entrance it was both cramped and comforting, with shabby furniture strewn around the room in arrangements allowing for small group conversations, and tall thin windows providing natural light from above. Along all the walls in between the windows were hundreds of photographs, old letters and commentaries, prayers, poems, and even some amulets openly displayed, Dean was surprised to note. He’d stayed with Sam and Jess in their tiny apartment in Boston, of course, but had never set foot in Sam’s yeshiva the entire time he attended there.

As far as Dean could tell there was no administrative offices at all at the front of the building, so it was hard to pin it as a school at all. Sam beckoned them down one of the branching hallways away from the windows, following along a sign with an arrow marked _Beit Knesset_.

Dean sat in as far as the back as he could politely get away with while morning prayers were rattled off. Cas sat next to him, his face blank at watching the repetitive prayers that had flown into realm of angels for thousands of years. Dean was also surprised to see a few women there, huddled off in their own corner but not physically out of eyesight, a sign that the place was at least somewhat relaxed in its approach to tradition.

The rabbi, along with many of the students, wasn’t evincing a look of the crusty ancients either. More simply stodgy and old-fashioned. He wandered over to give Sam a handshake and nodded acknowledgment to the silent Dean and Cas hovering next to him.

Cas continued to watch the praying group impassively.

Sam actually looked nervous as they wandered over to speak with his old teacher after the service completed. After Jess’s death, he’d left abruptly in grief, unable to face his community with the loss of faith. But the rabbi gave him a broad smile, and to Dean’s surprise, a fatherly hug.

“So good to see you again, Sam. I was worried about you after the your loss.”

Sam nodded, and Dean could tell he was barely holding it together. He’d had no idea that this place was so…familial.

“Rav Abulafia, this is my brother Dean. I’ve told you about him.”

“Oh, great, my reputation precedes me,” Dean said, but he shook the rabbi’s hand.

“And this is, uh, Cas. Can we speak to you in your office? It’s important.”

The rabbi’s office was iconic, crammed full of book of every size and shape, piled up irregularly between stacks of papers and notes pinned to the wall. Here too Dean noted the amulets and magical symbology. Not just a rabbi, then. A maskil, a person purportedly with wisdom and hidden knowledge. This was at least promising for their task, although Dean was wary that the guy would have the necessary down and dirty practical skills to work an actual spell.

“Rabbi Isaac Abulafia, son of Avishai, son of Nathan,” Cas said, without preamble or introduction from Sam. The rabbi's eyes widened at the formal invocation. “In the name of the Adonai our Lord, I request assistance with a holy mission of the divine here in Asiyah.” And then, just to demonstrate he wasn’t fucking around, he blinked out and a second later back in, across the room.

“Yup, an angel,” Dean said.

The rabbi didn’t seemed frightened or overawed or even startled, but simply looked Cas, then looked at Dean and Sam. “Your family does get up to the most interesting adventures, young man,” he told Sam. He turned back to Castiel. “Tell me, malach, are you under adjuration here today? No one is forcing you, or them, to do this?”

“No,” Cas said. “They are aware of my Name, and have behaved honorably.”

“I would hope so, but I had to ask.” He leaned back in the thick chair and evaluated Cas thoughtfully. “There is a great deal of knowledge within these walls, as I’m sure Sam has told you. Knowledge leading to powers possibly not available to the angels, which I assume is why you are here. But the forces of Creation must be used with the utmost care and purity of heart, or it simply opens the door to a flood of demons. I have many students who would not be unable to withstand such an attack. They do not come from a long line of kabbalists, and the risks and temptations of power will not be familiar to them.”

“I understand,” Cas said. “The task I request is not beyond you, nor will it attract the evil forces. It is a matter between the angels and humans. I am required to locate two angels currently residing in this plane, disguised as human. Their whereabouts have been unknown since shortly after incarnation.”

“They have fallen?” Abulafia asked.

For once Castiel looked surprised, as if he never expected a human to figure out the mystery so soon. “I do not know for sure, but there are signs,” he admitted. “How did you know?”

“Because, if someone or something was forcibly hiding them from the view of the angels, or adjuring them for dark purposes, you would not be so confident that the forces of evil will not harm my students,” Abulafia said. “A matter exclusively of humans and angels is really a matter of angels becoming human. And two together implies that they decided together, or one convinced the other. I understand that love is known all the way up to Atzilut, for all beings instinctively love Hashem. For the angels, though, it is not normally so personal.”

“This guy is good,” Dean muttered to Sam. Sam grinned back.

“So the question becomes, should we help you locate them,” the rabbi continued. “Why is it such a terrible thing for the angels to develop free will and fall to humanity? Are they inevitably bearers of destruction and chaos, or are they no worse than ordinary people? Because I find it hard to imagine that beings with their roots in heaven will inevitably fall to evil.”

“I have no basis for evaluating their current character, but history is not encouraging,” Cas said. “The temptations of Earth and the body are many, and it is never wise for the upper echelon of angels to spend too much time here. Your own holy texts tell you the same. But that is not the essence of my request. I am asking for your help on the same basis that I am here — because it was asked of me by the Lord our God, and I must obey. You have not been ordered and are not obligated to obey in this matter. But I am asking for you to adhere to the will of God nonetheless.”

“A solid argument,” Abulafia said. “Although if Hashem personally made requests and answered prayers as in the old days, there would not be so much doubt and confusion in the world.”

Amen, thought Dean.

“I do not have knowledge of God’s plan for the flow of creation for this world,” Cas said. “Perhaps there’s a reason He has withdrawn so far away from Asiyah, to give humans the space to look after their own condition.”

“Perhaps.” Rabbi Abulafia paused, and tapped his fingertips together, thinking. “I will assist you, and gather some students to assist me. I’ve never been asked for anything by a holy angel before, that I know of at least. Who am I to tell you no?” He looked at Sam, then a bit more hesitantly at Dean. “I assume you want to be in on it, Sam, and perhaps your brother, if you have the discipline.”

“Hey, I can do discipline if I have to,” Dean complained. “If you’re talking purity stuff for magic, please, I’ve been doing that since I was five.”

“It is not _magic_ , young man, it is the true Kabbalah.”

Dean could practically see the fancy embellished Kuf the way he pronounced Kabbalah. “Whatever, Rabbi, it’s all spells and magic to me. You are just buffing it up with a respectable finish.”

Abulafia shook his head, then turned back to Cas. “I will require the angels’ Names, malach. And your own, if you wish to add our own power.”

“I need to refrain from saying them, for it will alert the angels to my presence and interest. I have already revealed them once.”

The rabbi pulled a pad of beautiful fine paper and a fountain pen out of his desk. “Write them down, then.”

Castiel scribbled Anael and Anayel in thick curving lines, then added the nikud vowel markers for good measure, so there would be no guessing on the pronunciation. The letters minus the point marks seemed to glow for a few seconds, showing off their holy origin, before fading to normal ink. He didn’t put down his own Name.

Rav Abulafia nodded, the unnatural glow seeming to erase any doubts on the matter. “Do you intend to participate, holy malach?”

“I will participate in the same manner as a human would, until we have called them here,” Cas said. “Our purpose is utilize human ritual adapted to the physical realm of Asiyah. You have your own ‘magic’, apart from the angels.”

“Come on, you’re in the practical kabbalist club now,” Dean protested. “I mean, we supposedly got this stuff from the angels of yore to begin with, so you sure you can’t, I dunno, drop in some some new Hashem mojo? Give us the Name.”

“No,” Cas said simply. “I’m not…”

“…authorized to give us shit, we get it,” Dean finished for him. “Well, we’ll do it our way, then. I assume you had some version of permutations from Sefer Yetzirah in mind,” he added to Abulafia.

The rabbi looked slightly surprised that Dean had even heard of it, which caused him to suppress another eye roll. The establishment really did think that the dirty kabbalists muttered nonsense words to any paying rube that came along. Well, maybe some did, but Dean Winchester trafficked in real magic, and it did, on occasion, require reading real books. Sometimes he wondered what exactly Sam had to say about the family to get into this place to begin with.

“We’ll need to start with ritual purification,” Abulafia said. “Then two days of fasting and prayer, followed by over a day to permutate the letters. We should take it slowly, to avoid any mistakes. That means Wednesday is the first day we can reasonably call your wayward angels.”

Cas only nodded, his face blank. Dean wondered if this all seemed like a ridiculous waste of effort to him, a powerful being used to simply acting on his will, without any of this bothersome physical body stuff to deal with. Three total days of fasting — well, the angel would find out what uncomfortable was.

* * * *

They started with a dip in a nearby mikvah, a pool of collected rainwater that supposedly would wash away all traces of Biblically-detailed ritual impurity. Outside of the Temple and the satellite sacrifice areas scattered through the vast diaspora, most people walked around in state of impurity all the time, it being too much effort to keep track of the array of bodily fluids, sex acts and magically cootied objects to remain pure for any length of time. Despite this the mikvah remained popular in many sects for immersion before Shabbat and other significant events, and among women and girls after menstruation.

It was the sort of thing Dean wouldn’t give two flips about under normal circumstances — in fact, he’d probably mock it with disdain, except for the fact that practically every elaborate magic ritual began with a mikvah dunk. So reluctantly he admitted there must be something about it that mattered beyond cultural inertia. On the positive side the ritual could put one into a meditative frame of mind, what with fresh beginnings and all. The symbolism wasn’t subtle.

On the negative side of the ledger, however, was Dean’s current experience of being glared at by the men’s mikvah attendant for his obviously unkosher skin art, while awkwardly standing around in the absolute buff. Dean glared through him, daring the dude with his eyes to say something. But then Abulafia came out with a few other fellows in robes — including Cas and Sam — and dismissed the attendant.

“Thank you, Edmund, I will supervise the immersion today. Private group event.”

Eddie lowered his eyes in respect, and left with only a lingering shot of disapproval over his shoulder.

Dean’s other dilemma came straight on the heels of that, when Cas’s turn to immerse came up. The angel went last, after watching everyone else with aloof disinterest. Dean wasn’t so much of a horndog that he couldn’t hold his gaze with a bunch of stripped down guys, especially when one was his brother and another an elderly teacher. But with Cas, even though he’d already spotted him naked once, Dean yet again had to shove aside all thoughts of just how attractive the guy was. Or his body was. Or how his body was attached to a uninhibited angel without social skills, who wouldn’t care if Dean outright gawked in admiration. Dean dropped his eyes just as Cas glanced up, evidently sensing that he was being watched by Dean. That fact alone was enough to make him uncomfortable.

They gathered together back in the school synagogue, joined by a few women who had immersed earlier. All the chairs had been removed, replaced only with a few plain mats on the floors for the group to sit on. Some glass carafes of water and hot tea were set up in the back, representing their only nourishment for three days. And they all sat as one, not touching one another, and the prayers began. They started with the psalms, the most basic Bibliomancy, the basic form of which Dean knew since he was three. Each psalm was chanted seven times without melody, then they repeated the cycle of 150 psalms seven times. Magic numbers within numbers, the whole thing designed to gobble up time and put all participants into an altered, focused frame of mind. Closer to Yetzirah, the realms of the angels, they said. Cas remained mum on the truth of that point.

After two days of rote recitation, fasting and not much sleep, they were finally ready to begin the meat of the spell, a complex series of combining and recombined Hebrew letters in a certain order. Mathematically, there were so many combinations it would take another full day to get through them all. Dean was familiar with the concept, which had been a favorite of the secret rabbinical societies for centuries. It was said great power could be focused and formed through the manipulation of letters: Artificial beings brought to a type of life and canceled back to dust, miraculous banquets for the righteous sprung out of nowhere, or the spirits of the saints or prophets of old brought back for a conversation. A small spark of creation harnessed, in other words. To Dean’s mind their purpose in this run was much more prosaic: to over-power an otherwise ordinary adjuration, and compel the wayward seraphim to come to that very room.

For thirty-six hours they rolled through combinations of letters. The group’s chanting speed increased in lockstep, driven by Abulafia as if conducting an orchestra. Dean dropped out of verbalizing, afraid of making an error in his fatigue, although he still put some concentration and will into it to increase the group’s energy. But also he wanted to keep a tiny piece of attention on Cas, to observe his reaction when they reached the critical moment, which would arrive very soon. Sam seemed to be in the thick of it, swaying with each turn of a syllable, but his eyes were open and glassy, and Dean suspected he too was watching Cas.

They finally rolled their way to the adjuration itself. The energy in the room had reached electric spark levels, and Dean wished they had chosen a location other than a three-hundred year old school with a precious library that could burn down. It was too late now. As one they stopped speaking, and Abulafia began to sing the long, 72-letter name of God that Dean and Sam had carefully taught him. And at the end of it, they all joined in again, speaking as one:

_By the holy name, we command, cajole and adjure the angels we shall Name to immediately appear before us, no matter where on Earth they currently reside, and resist fleeing. We adjure you, Anael and Anayel._

Simple words, but with the force of the cosmos pushing it to the end.

The air shifted as they uttered the Names of the angels, as if a breath blew through the room. Then it become a maelstrom. Dean recognized that the angels were fighting back, and probably would have broken away under any ordinary adjurement, but the force from a dozen people dragged them there anyway, painfully through the next World. Dean hopped to his feet off the floor, along with Cas and Sam.

And then two women, similar-looking with pale skin and dark hair, popped into existence right in the middle of the circle. For an instant after their arrival the air turned stark still, as if everyone was waiting for something to happen. Then the stillness was broken by the sharp shriek of a terrified baby. One of the angels was bent over and half-holding onto a chubby toddler, as if trying to release the baby onto the floor before being forced through the ether. But she had been unsuccessful, and was still in physical contact when the world itself suddenly became her prison.

Cas turned his attention to the squalling child, his eyes so cold it made even Dean’s stomach drop for an instant. The two angels registered Castiel’s presence and his malevolence at the same time. The one low to the ground dove down even further, cradling the child underneath her. The other jumped in front of her partner to form a living shield.

Castiel raised his hand towards them.

“Wait, Cas, no!” Dean cried out.

At the same time, Sam jumped up to act. “ _Ani mashbiakha et Castiel b’koach shemot Adonai…_ ” He began to rattle off their plain old workhouse adjuration, minus most of the Names of God that would give it some teeth. But it wouldn’t be enough to restrain an angel of any power for long.

Dean bounded over the five steps to place himself between the women and Cas. “Anael and Anayel, we unbind and release you. Go. Now.” Behind him he felt the will of the confused group of students agree with him, breaking their concentration and thus energies of the previous spell.

One of the angels, the one holding the baby, looked oddly grateful to him. The other just appeared to be pissed, which as far as Dean was concerned was the more understandable reaction. Both simultaneously blinked out.

Sam moved his hand, releasing Cas from the minor adjuration. It wouldn’t have lasted long anyway, if Cas had been less distracted.

“I asked you not to abuse my Name,” Castiel snapped, as soon as Sam’s hand went down.

“I am not going to let you kill a baby, not while I’m standing here,” Sam barked back. “Dean, take him out of here. I’ll… explain to Rav Abulafia what we know.”

The Rabbi looked like he needed more than a mild mollification, and was about to throw them all bodily out. Dean nodded and nudged Cas’s arm with his hand to motion him out of the room.

“Sam,” he said, herding Cas to the door, “don’t you think we should both…”

“No!” Sam’s voice was sharp and bleak. “I’m done, Dean. You can continue if you want, you were the one called upon here by angels for help. But I’m not participating in hunting down two moms and a kid. Not even for a malach.”

  
  



	6. Hesed

_**Hesed** \- Loving-kindness, boundless, love of God, inspiring vision, fire, expansion, generosity, peace. Benevolence without end._   


“Cas, what the hell!” Dean almost shouted at him, as they spilled out of the doors of Torat Or onto the Boston streets. “Why didn’t you sit down and fucking talk with us about what you were planning to do?”

“Because, based on your previous reactions, I thought it probable you would not go through with the ritual,” Cas said. Far from the anger and hate of a few minutes prior, now his face was covered in confusion. Not regret exactly, but bafflement on why his damnable task was interrupted. “It was an excellent opportunity to interrogate them, or isolate them for questioning. I did not know the child would be brought along.”

“You know why we stopped you, right? We can’t let you do …what you were planning to do.” Dean halted on the sidewalk and pulled Cas to a standstill too. To the angel’s annoyance, but Dean didn’t even know where they were marching to.

“Sentiment, Dean, that’s why you stopped me. You do not know what that child may bring to the world if allowed to live. Such things were the cause of the Flood, and all its untold horrors.”

“Yeah, and God said he was sorry and promised not to do it again,” Dean shot back sarcastically. “The truth is, _you_ are the one who doesn’t know what will happen. It’s a baby. Every one of them could grow up sweet or rotten, even the ones with the worst parents. You. Don’t. Know.”

“It doesn’t matter what I know,” Cas said softly. “I have orders, I have no choice.”

“I don’t see some invisible puppet strings forcing you to do this, Cas,” Dean said. “There’s always a choice.”

Cas shook his head. “You think like a human.”

“You’re dressed up like a human, hanging out with humans, chasing down would-be humans. Not the end of the world to think like a human. Why couldn’t you try _talking_ to those poor angels instead of getting out the smite hooks? For all you know, they could have adopted that kid from the Miriamists to play mommy, and she’s totally human.”

“That is highly unlikely.” But his face betrayed the fact that he was more ambivalent than ever.

Dean sighed and ran a weary hand through his hair. “Look, we’re both exhausted. Haven’t slept much, haven’t eaten in three days, haven’t had a shower since, like, Friday. You can’t think straight like this.”

“I do not require sleep. I do not require food or bathing.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that Cas, and yet you’re dead on your feet. Have eaten _anything_ since forming that body?”

“It was created with sufficient matter-energy stores to complete this mission,” Cas insisted.

“Oh, great, I’ll have a skeleton angel on my hands in a couple of weeks. What do you say we go back to the room, clean ourselves up, grab some food, and we can discuss this whole mission thing like civilized men instead of desperate starving barbarians.”

“I do not…”

“…require food, yeah, you said that. Anything in the angel rulebook that says you _can’t_ eat food? Didn’t think so.”

He strode off towards the hostel, knowing — or at least hoping — Cas would follow. Where else would he go? The entire Earth at his fingertips, but Dean was his only real connection to it.

It wasn’t until the two of them were alone together in the room, lacking a buffer in the form of Sam, that Dean began to realize the terrible temptation that awaited him.

“Step one, you’ve got to ditch those nasty clothes for laundry,” he found himself saying. “Step two, shower. I’ll, uh, let you borrow some of my clothes.”

And that’s how Dean Winchester, the dude whisperer, ended up sitting at the small kitchen table with his shirt off, a pile of food and light alcohol in front of him, sitting next to a damp half-naked angel.

“The shower was pleasant,” Cas admitted as he wandered back into the room from the shared bathroom down the hall. “I’m surprised something as simple as plain hot water can be refreshing, even though it does not sterilize the body.”

Dean tipped him a bottle of cider in encouragement. He did have the foresight to send Cas down there with some jeans and instructions to put them on, just so the angel didn’t flash the whole hostel in the buff. “Told you. You can enjoy your body without getting all worked up about it. It’s the little things. Here, I’ve got our stuff in the washing machine downstairs, so you should sit and relax. Eat. Drink.”

He’d already given in and stuffed his own mouth full of savory pie, but had saved a selection of treats for Cas’s first meal. Seventy-two hours was a long fucking fast.

Cas stiffly lowered himself into a chair, and Dean tried to ignore how hot he was without a shirt. “It does seem…appealing,” Cas said.

 _You have no idea,_ thought Dean, and then promptly tried to squash it. The ratio of inappropriate inner commentary was getting harder and harder to ignore, however, especially now that he was beginning to chill out from the melodrama.

“Food is good,” he agreed. “So, the meat bakery around the corner was the best thing open this time of the morning, lunch counter not open yet so I didn’t get sandwiches. Instead, it’s a breakfast of pastries. Turkey pie, my favorite, full of protein.” He held up the second moon-shaped pocket and slid it over. “Potato-onion knish. Another something with vegetables and pesto sauce, kind of awful but you should try everything once. Rye rolls and a pickled fish salad. Parve croissant, don’t want to know how that works. And for dessert, chocolate cookies and a cherry streusel. In season, the dude told me, and it smelled delicious.”

As Dean babbled on, Cas stared at the piled up spread in front of him with a look of increasing alarm. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit much. Not a good idea to wander into a bakery when you haven’t eaten in three days. Just take a bite of the turkey to start.”

Cas gnawed on a tiny corner of the meat pie. “Good,” he said, unconvincingly. “Is that…salt? And a dead animal?”

“Fine, fine, everyone’s a critic. And don’t go turning vegetarian on me, dead animal is tasty. How about something sweet?” He pushed the cherry pastry to the forefront of the pile.

Tentatively, Cas reached his tongue out and licked a tiny red crumb. This time a genuine smile crept across his face. “That is also very pleasant,” he said, taking a bigger bite.

“Progress at last. Sugar wins everyone over. Here, try a drink too. I mean, I know it’s ten in the morning, but we’re just going to crash after this anyway. Call it dinner before lunch.”

He popped the top off another bottle of cider, another decent specialty of the region. Cas sniffed it dubiously before mimicking Dean’s swig with his own. Then he frowned and pushed it back away from himself. Dean laughed.

“That is disgusting, and it contains a chemical with the property to alter perception and other brain functions,” Cas said.

“Yup. Blessed are you, the Lord our God, who created the fruit of the tree,” Dean said, and chuckled harder.

“It’s fizzy on the tongue.”

“Yuuuuup. Here, have some herring salad.”

After torturing Cas a few minutes with alternating tricks and treats, Dean decided he’d softened Cas up enough to get serious.

“So, Sam called while you were down the hall. He seems to have calmed down the chaos we left behind. But you really burned his reputation there, Cas.”

“I am sorry to cause your brother distress,” Cas said. “But I had a purpose there, and it was not to teach humans how to do an extended adjuration. Their concerns were secondary.”

“Rabbi Abulafia’s faith is apparently shaken, and some of his students are in even worse shape. And Sam’s had a pretty horrible year too. Lost his wife, you know, and our Dad died last year. He’s kind of been adrift ever since.”

“Jessica Lee Moore Winchester, and John Eric Winchester. They have passed beyond now. It should be a comfort.”

“It isn’t, Cas. It hurts when we lose people, even when you have faith that there’s something in the World to Come for us lowly humans. So maybe, when all this blows over and you’ve done everything you came to do, you might think about dropping into the school and explaining it all to them.”

“That is not in my mission, but it seems like the right thing to do.”

“Yeah.”

They sat in silence for a few more moments. Privately Dean was surprised he’d made any headway at all with the stubborn angel. And honestly, although the cider was hardly enough to cause a buzz, it wasn’t helping his fatigue, which in the absence of adrenaline and the sheer concentrative will from the magic, was creeping up on him. Cas took another bite of a sugary item, this time chocolate.

“I should not enjoy this,” Cas murmured. His eyes drifted down, as exhaustion was beginning to overwhelm him too, just like it had days ago when they’d first rented this room.

“Why not?” Dean asked. “You’re practically a tourist in Asiyah, why not experience stuff?”

“This body has a purpose. Its purpose is not pleasure. We are required to take an animating soul is order to function here, but I can feel…” He clamped his mouth shut, as if some secret had been revealed.

“Feel what?” Dean prompted gently.

“Feel something.” He opened his eyes again, and now they showed confusion, sorrow. “This soul binds me — what I think of as me — to the body. But I can feel it growing tighter. Now the emotions from above mingle with the physical sensations from below. The taste of this food provokes happiness in you, and in me. Hot water, a simple vibrating molecule, is comforting. I sense your disapproval of my mission, and the terror of the rebel angels, and feel regret over what must happen. I wish to close my eyes to the restful oblivion of sleep, and wonder what it is like to dream. I do not understand what is happening here.”

“You’re having a human moment,” Dean said. “Maybe you should learn to enjoy that too, whatever it brings. It’s not all sunshine and roses down here on Earth, but that can sometimes be worth living for too.”

“I should not be feeling this way. This is not safe for my kind.”

“Welcome to life. Not safe for anybody.” He took another gulp of cider.

Cas was almost drifting off in his chair, so Dean pushed away from the table and gently touched him on the arm, intending to direct him to a bed. He didn’t mean it in any sexual way, but as soon as contact was made, it electrified him nonetheless. Cas’s eyes opened and he looked up at Dean in surprise.

“Need sleep, dude. We both do. Let’s go.”

“Physical contact is also pleasant,” Cas said. “Why don’t you do that more often?”

“Men don’t touch men,” Dean gritted out. “Not much, anyway.”

“You do, despite your nation’s taboos,” Cas pointed out.

“You have your mission, I have mine,” Dean said softly. “And one of mine is to not corrupt angels with abominations. Don’t worry about it, Cas, just, I don’t know, lay down and sleep. There’ll be less confusion tomorrow. Or tonight, whenever we wake up.”

Cas’s eyes drifted down as soon as he was off his feet. Dean threw a blanket over him and let himself touch Cas’s hand one last time, as an indulgence, vowing to let it go in the future. Then he left him for the other bed, and lay down to rest himself.

  
  



	7. Tiferet

**Tiferet** \- Beauty, compassion, heart, mercy, truth.  


Dean woke up with a bare arm around his chest.

It wasn’t so much the unalerted cuddling that disturbed him, but the fact that Cas has apparently managed to sneak into bed while Dean was sleeping, and it hadn’t even woken him up. Dean prided himself on being alert and wary of danger, so that was alarming. And then the second thing, the presence of a warm chest pressed against his back was making him tense and aroused as hell. Not a good place to be with someone who you couldn’t wake up with a friendly hand job.

Slowly Dean rolled around to face his attack snuggler. Cas was still out, and his twitchy eyelids indicated he might be dreaming. Dean wondered if Cas had slept-walked over to his bed.

“Hey, Cas,” he whispered, their faces just inches from each other. “Wake up, dude, this isn’t a slumber party.”

Cas’s eyes fluttered open, and it took an unfocused second or two for him to recognize where he was. Then he jerked back in shock, and sat up. Dean decided to go with the fake relaxed approach, and propped himself up on a hand.

“You okay? Just needed a warm body as a human binkie or something?”

“I…” Cas started to say, then had to start over. “I remember now. It seemed like you would not mind at the time.”

“I don’t exactly mind,  but it’s, you know, traditional to consult a guy before you get into bed with him. So that, uh, no one gets the wrong impression.”

“What is, ‘the wrong impression’?” Cas asked, and Dean could practically see the quotes in the air.

“A sexual impression,” Dean said bluntly. “As in, sexual interest. You’re kind of hot, Cas. Don’t go crawling into bed with any ladies, either. Bad on multiple levels.”

“Hot?” Cas said dubiously. “My body temperature…”

“I mean you are sexually attractive.” God, was he really having this conversation with an angel? In bed with an angel, both of them only half dressed? “People would like to have sex with you, at least before you open your mouth.”

“That doesn’t… I never thought of that,” Cas stuttered. If his frown went any deeper his face sink into itself. “Angels do not exhibit sexual interest.”

“Well, normally you’re an incorporeal being that lives forever, and I’ve never heard of baby angels either, so technically there might not be much point to it? On the other hand, there was that whole nephilim, angels-fucking-women thing from the Bible, so you might not be as neutered as you think you are.”

“Do you find me sexually attractive, Dean?”

 _Fuuuuuuuuuck,_  thought Dean. Absolutely no way out of it, he’d really walked into that one. Cas was kind of like an emotional child with all the knowledge of biology at his fingertips, so Dean opted to keep up the bluntness train. The angel wasn’t going to get subtleties.

“Yeah, Cas, I kind of do.” He took a deep breath and began to rattle off his _it’s not you it’s me_ speech. “But before you freak out about it, it’s no big deal. A lot of guys are hot. But the vast majority of the time, those guys are not equipped to find me hot back. In fact they might flip out if they find out about it, so I have to keep it to myself. Do you get the dilemma here? Happens all the time.”

“You are at a statistical disadvantage in finding sexual partners, as well as a cultural disadvantage.”

“That about sums it up, yeah.”

“But you chose to tell me.”

Dean shrugged. “You asked, I answered. But for future reference, if a guy crawls into bed with me with his shirt off, things might get a little handsy.”

Cas jumped out of bed. “I’ve made a mistake,” he declared, and Dean’s heart sunk. “This is not right. This is the root of the errors.  The nefesh of this body is too strong. We must go to Jerusalem.”

“Dude, I really meant it when I said don’t freak out,” Dean snapped. “It doesn’t have to change anything. I can keep my mouth shut and my feelings to myself.”

Cas popped his — well, Dean’s — buttoned shirt over his head, and tossed the last other clean one over to him. “Your feelings are not the problem here, Dean. The problem is this body is too human, or too close to the animals. I should not feel drives for sleep, hunger, or sex. I may have to trade it in for a new one.”

“Wait, what?”

“I think I can arrange a less sexually attractive form for next time. That will solve your problem as well.”

“Oh my God, Cas, no. I didn’t mean…”

Castiel touched his shoulder, and suddenly they were no longer in the room.

Dean was barely getting used to angel transport, but this time it was near instantaneous. Maybe because Cas was in a hurry, or he knew exactly where he was going, but there was no sensation of movement or flying. The surrounding environment simply _changed_. The air was a blasting furnace where they ended up, in a small outdoor square or balcony in bright open sun. The hilly horizon was far off, lending an impression that they were up at some height. Every surface of the tall buildings off two sides around them was made up of a beige-orange swirling limestone, sometimes rough, sometimes polished to gleaming.

“Stay here,” Cas said. And before Dean could get in another word he blinked out, leaving Dean standing there alone, still holding his shirt.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean muttered. “Praying to you, Castiel, angel on high. I know you can hear this. Next time, tell a guy where we’re going in fucking advance.”

He walked over to the railing, to get a better look at where they landed. He was on a hilltop, on the edge of a vast array buildings, staircases and turrets. The hillside right below him plunged precipitously down to a dry gully, and on the next hillside over he could see tens of thousands of white gravestone markers, spilling over the horizon like a slow-moving infection.

Dean knew exactly where he was, from countless photographs and live television shots on the holidays.The giant hill of tombs was the Mount of Olives, and he was standing on the outskirts of the jumbled complex of ancient buildings that made up the Beit Mikdash, the goddamned Holy Temple, the most important site of sanctification and sacrifice for the world’s 800 million Jews.

“DON’T! TOUCH! ANYTHING!” a female voice shouted at him in Hebrew.

Dean jumped back from the railing and swung around. At the same time the lady spotted the tattoos all over Dean’s body, and emitted a little scream.

“Everything’s okay,” Dean said slowly, in what was probably a horrible provincial accent. “An angel dropped me off here. I don’t know where I am, exactly.” He waved a hand at her to calm down, then decided it would de-escalate the situation to put on his shirt.

“Are you Jewish?” she barked.

“What? Yes.” Had she missed all the Hebrew tacked onto his chest?

“Kohen or Levi?”

“Um, no.”

“When was the last time you went to the mikvah?” The implied _I bet never_ hung in the air.

“On Sunday, actually. Got me in an unusually pure week,” Dean said evenly. At last he saw where this was going. Out in the boonies where Dean and Sam lived, even the obsessively observant tended to be lax in matters of ritual purity. It was just assumed that you weren’t, except under unusual circumstances, like a wedding or conducting a three-day angel adjuration. But here in Jerusalem, a city dominated by priestly families that claimed direct lineage all the way back to Mt. Sinai, everything revolved around it.  You couldn’t just drop an ordinary person, who didn’t run to the mikvah every time they jacked off or shook hands with a maybe menstruating woman, right onto the purest piece of real estate on Earth.

“It’s Thursday,” she said dubiously. They were forward a few time zones, so here it must be morning. “Come with me. Do not touch anything with your hands.”

Dean padded along down a staircase cut alongside the cliff. He supposed it was a good thing he was still wearing socks — were the impurity cooties catching through cloth? He couldn’t be bothered to remember —  but his shoes were thousands of miles away. “Did you hear the part about the angel? Any idea where he would go around here?”

“Leaving or coming?”

“Sorry, what?”

“Your angel,” she said slowly, “Is he leaving his body behind in Asiyah?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. He was agitated when we came here.” Dean paused while they crossed around a portico, then down yet another flight of stairs. “He … do that here? I never thought where the bodies go after the angels leave. In the holy places outside the land, the angels cross over, but we don’t see them go back.”

“Here,” she said, and took him back up a side staircase to a small rooftop overlooking the city walls. From there she pointed off in the distance to a large, squat, foreboding building rising up at the pinnacle of the Mount of Olives cemetery. It was built of pure white stone, reflecting the same as the grave markers, but formed into a perfect circle with a flat top. From this vantage point Dean could see the center of the circle was carved out, and a light beam that shimmered from gray to orange dribbled up like smoke out of the center and aimed for the sky. The building’s clean perfect shape stood in alien contrast to the organic jumble of structures that made up Jerusalem’s old city and the newer suburbs around the Sanhedrin visible in the haze to the northwest.

The building looked…familiar, as if Dean was aware of archaic references to it from some dusty tome. But he couldn’t remember ever seeing it before this day. Not in film, at least. He squinted at the horizon, trying to remember if there’d ever been anything notable about the hill besides the vast cemetery.

“The angels leave from there,” the woman told him.

“How have I never seen a photo of this building?” Dean asked. Or tried to ask. He must have mangled the grammar, for the woman gave him a baffled look. “No photos?” he clarified, and mimed the expanse of the building and wiggled his fingers up for the smoke.

“The Light is too bright,” she said, and Dean knew she wasn’t referring to the sun or the ordinary sky. “Heaven leaks through. Images will not hold.”

The word for heaven, shemayim, was the same as skies. Never did the homonym ring more true than at that moment.

“It’s, uh, a forever weak place between Asiyah and Yetzirah?” Dean asked, forgetting the word for “permanent.” Crap, he really wished Sam was here. Not only did his brother have full command of the language, including all ancient and modern versions, he probably knew all about this there-not-there angel body discard site. The camera thing, though, he was familiar with, once he thought about it. The same effect was also true at angel landing sites, much to the naturalists’ despair. Although in that case the blinding flash of energy was only temporary, right at the moment when the angels ripped through.

“All of the holy city is a weak point,” the woman replied. “The angels chose that place to ascend because it is a place of death, not life. There are a few others.”

“Can I walk over there?” Dean asked. Cas did say to stay put, but without further explanation, hell if Dean was going to listen to that.

The woman shook her head. “Dangerous,” she said. “No pilgrims allowed. A certain family of Levites handles the bodies. They’ve done it for centuries. A blessing and a curse.”

She turned and motioned him away, back down into the alley. This one sloped precipitously downwards, the middle of it carved smooth into a drainage furrow. Dean idly wondered how many centuries of kids had fallen on their asses down such passageways during a slick rain.

They came out at street level and rounded a more tight corridors that led off to unmarked doors. Dean had no idea where he was. Technically the Temple itself, including the private residences of the high priest and the vast familial bureaucracy that surrounded him, occupied only the southeastern corner of the hilltop. Surrounding it were several huge plazas that accumulated hundreds of thousands of worshipers on the major pilgrimage holidays and public sacrifice dates. Beyond that was the rest of the city, generally newer, or at least with a crust of modernity, smashed up with the old: slightly less illustrious homes, public baths and fountains, hostels and hotels, markets, charities, restaurants, houses of study, competing houses of prayer from dozens of sects, ambassadorial outposts, tourist traps of all kinds. The Sanhedrin and its famous library, supposedly the oldest in the world, imposed from another hilltop to the west of the older gated part of the city.

It all formed a confusing mashup of different eras, building styles and functions, one built on top of another. Since the third Temple had been rededicated almost 1700 years before, it had been partially sacked and rebuilt at least five times. Dean again was sorry Sam was missing out; his brother would be staring in wide wonder at everything, and probably would be able to rattle of the history of every corner to boot.

The woman led him down through a small section of the market, out onto yet another open square, this one filled with milling people in the public section of the city. Dean noticed now she was the one who was careful not to touch anything. “Public baths are that way. I recommend you immerse before rejoining the angel, as a courtesy.”

 _The angel was fine with pressing up to my impure ass not an hour ago_ , thought Dean, but wisely chose not to say that out loud.

“That way is a charity hostel for pilgrims, if you have no shekels. Also they serve meals to the poor. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Dean said. Then as she turned to go back, he called out, “How do I, you know, get out of the city?”

“Bus stops are outside Damascus Gate, Benyamin’s Gate and Sion Gate.” She paused, then added, “Even a kabbalist friend of the angels should be careful among the dead.”

“I will. Thank you again.”

He made his way down to the charity first, in hopes of getting some new shoes. They dug up a pair of old but functional sandals without asking any questions, which made Dean wonder if foreigners falling from the sky sans proper clothing was an everyday occurrence in Jerusalem. Then he foraged a plastic water bottle and filled it at one of the dubiously hygienic public fountains, and set off in the direction of what he thought was the south. The Mount of Olives was to the east, but the Temple complex he’d just been so carefully extricated from was in the way. He figured the gates had to be on the main concourses, and he could always ask for directions if needed.

After what felt like a few miles of winding streets later, Dean emerged out of the formal old city. The “gate” consisted of an opening in the outer wall left clear of buildings, rather than a closable door. The road out of the ancient temple curved steeply down and around to the southwest, the opposite direction he intended to go. Dean walked over to the eastern edge, just to the side of a bus stop where a bored group of commuters ignored both him and the dazzling backdrop behind them. From this vantage point he could see the valley between the Old City’s hilltop and the eerie angel building cut down like a cliff, so sheer only some scrub brush and and scraggy goats could manage the drop.

He walked a few paces over to the bus stop and flashed a half-hearted smile at the waiting crowd. “How to walk…there?” he asked, exaggerating his gestures towards the angel landing site. Which even now, the clouds above it were increasingly storm-dark, and cut with a shimmering beam emerging from the round building’s center, in fantastic contrast to the deep azure of the sky elsewhere on the horizon.

Almost as one the Jerusalemites’ eyes flickered in the direction of the forbidden building, then away. “No, no, no,” said a clean-shaven dude with wild hair, emphasizing his words in slow pronunciation for the foreigner. “No, that place is not for pilgrims. Yerushalayim, double, two, you see? Connects the heavenly Jerusalem to the earthly Jerusalem. Only for the malachim. Inhuman.”

“It’s my ass to singe,” Dean muttered in his own language. Just his luck, a mystic. He doubted the old legend about Earth replicated through the Worlds represented reality, although the inhuman part was undoubtedly correct. Maybe Cas could clue him in there, were he ever to see Cas again.

Dean decided to press on. “I know. I have an angel friend. How to get there?” he argued, back in Hebrew.

The guy kept shaking his head. “If your angel wanted you to go there, she would take you there herself. Do not go.”

Dean shrugged in face of decent logic. “Angels aren’t perfect, believe me.” He turned and began to walk down the road. There probably was a closer gate on some other side of the Old City, but Dean didn’t feel like navigating that busy, blind maze again. A walk in the desert, with a clear view of his holy destination — it did have a nice prophetic ring to it.

About halfway down the road the hill leveled to a manageable slope, and he began to cut across the rocky valley.  It was rough climbing down in his terrible shoes, but the bottom formed a trail towards the white cemetery. On closer examination the gully appeared to be a dry creek bed, filled with a wild assortment of dusty bushes and crooked trees, crackling dry in the summer heat. Maybe it flooded down here in winter, maybe that’s why no one had built this piece of holy real estate up, for neither the living nor the dead nor the holy messengers that lived forever, for no one but the songbirds and wildflowers.

He wondered, as he walked, what the hell he was doing here. It was true, Cas could have brought him to the angel site, instead of dropping him in the middle of Obsessive Observance land. Or left him in Boston and reanimated back in Palmyra, if he really was going to ditch his pretty body and swap it in for a stubby old guy or a chick or something. Why did Cas care? What did Dean’s puny horndog attraction matter to an alien being, one who would blindly follow orders from on high to the end of days, no matter what stubborn human traits he encountered?

Why did Dean care, too?

It bothered him, this abandonment. He’d go back and make up with Sam, for they always forgave each other sooner or later, no matter how little they saw eye to eye. Family were the people who had to take you in, and the brothers never failed each other. Cas wasn’t family, but somehow in the space of a few days, he’d migrated in Dean’s mind to the status of “friend.” But maybe that was his mistake. Maybe Dean was only a tool for Cas to use, while the angel was only a tool for God to use. Hammers hitting nails, all the way down.

Dean had made his way to edge of the Mount of Olives, and began to climb. The cemetery was brutal on his nearly-bare feet. Hot shards of rock were everywhere, crumbling ancient grave markers and memorial pebbles mixed alike on crowded paths, rolling downhill. Everything seemed to be on top of one another in a jumble. And he’d run out of water right as the afternoon heat beat down, so that was another misery. But he was determined to make it up to the angel building. It loomed directly upwards on the slope, clean white lines jutting out of the hilltop and contrasting against the gray-black clouds blooming above.

At the upper third, newer flat slab gravestones appeared, cleanly maintained and devoid of any pebbles marking pilgrims or visitors. The engraved names shifted from the ornate human tributes — _Davora, daughter of  Eli Aharen the High Priest and Shireh, honorable wife of Rav Shomshin, shofet of Beitlechem, beloved mother and women’s songleader, may her name be a blessing!_ — to a handful of stark letters, all ending in aleph-lamed, _-el_.  Samandriel. Zachariel. Nathaniel. Asariel. Josaiel. Graves for the angel bodies, neatly aligned and organized like a library card catalog.

The vibe up near the building was familiar to Dean, crackling with the energy leaking out of the upper world of Yetzirah. Unlike the angel landing sites, though, here there was no sign of any living thing, not so much as a mutated herb or seven-winged insect. Just as he been warned, a place of death. If Cas was here, he was leaving, for this wasn’t a path to return to the living. The ground began to vibrate, although the graves and building appeared not to move, and sparks flicked from the column of smoke rising from the middle of the structure. An angel departure, Dean figured. His angel, perhaps. A blessing popped into his head, even though he normally ignored the practice unless it was necessary for a spell. Blessed are you our God, who fulfills the act of creation.

Dean sat down on the blank space on a one of the grave slabs  — Michael, one of the big ones — and watched the sparks rising from the building, crackling into nothing. This was as insane as a newly minted bar mitzvah boy going up against a night demon, he thought. He was completely unprepared. Should have listened to the natives.

“Are you leaving me, Cas?” he muttered. Dean could have invoked Castiel’s full name, to let him know where he was, no matter where Cas himself was now. But the whole day had been so confusing, Dean wanted to think about it first. Even if Cas came back, did he really want to continue to help an angel hell-bent on a mission that Dean might disagree with? Just because Cas had specifically named him, it didn’t mean he was obligated to follow. Was it worth it to hang out with a half-cocked angel, who didn’t listen to directions or ask for help, even when it was obvious he didn’t have the proper information to interpret a very human situation correctly?

Maybe that was his role in all this, thought Dean. To bridge the human-angel gap. And there were two angels in all of this whom he hadn’t talked to, and who needed to have their own voices heard. Or at least, Dean needed to hear their side before deciding if he could go on with Cas, assuming Cas came back in whatever form.

So he set the empty water bottle down, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

A prayer for Anael and Anayel, he said softly, barely above his breath. This is Dean Winchester. Um, the dude with the angel who’s chasing you. I was one of the kabbalists that was there this morning. I just want to talk. I don’t want to hurt either one of you or the baby. I, uh, don’t know what to believe anymore.

“Hello, Dean,” said a voice behind him.

  
  



	8. Binah

_**Binah** \- Understanding, expansion, comprehension, insight, joy._

 

He opened his eyes and twisted around. The same young woman from the adjuration was standing there. She had been the angry one, the one who had leaped in front of her partner holding the baby, but now seemed calm, almost serene.

“Are you Anael or Anayel?” Dean asked.

“We go by Anna and Hannah now. I’m Anna,” she said, and leaned over to offer a hand in greeting. He took it, a little hesitantly, and didn’t stand up on the theory of not startling her. Instead, she plopped her butt down on the dusty shale next to him.

“Thanks for coming,” Dean told her. “It’s was a risk, I know. This could have been a trap.”

“Another trap, you mean, like last time?”

“Uhhhh, yeah. Sorry. We didn’t know Cas would go off on you immediately like that.”

“Cas. That’s cute. Nice way to avoid the Name. You know it wasn’t Hannah or me that he was after, right?”

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure. Maybe we didn’t want to know.”

“You need the full story, Dean Winchester. And lucky for you, your good friend Cas is majorly preoccupied, so I have time to tell it. And maybe together we can change the ending.”

“Remains to be seen if I want to do that,” Dean retorted. He didn’t want to capitulate _too_ much right out of the gate. “You can tell what Cas is doing? I mean, he just blinked me here from Boston and then flipped the fuck out. Something about replacing his body, which sounds like a pain in the ass to me.”

“Indeed. Maybe what I have to say will shed some light on that.”

She settled forward, and crossed her hands over her knees. It seemed effortlessly human. The sun was dipping down towards the horizon off to their left, over a sea just beyond the boundary of their vision. _Almost the sixth day,_ Dean thought. The day people were created. Possibly God’s greatest fuckup.

“I was the one who was initially corrupted by humanity,” Anna started. “They sent me over several Earth years ago, to corral the soul of a tzaddik that refused to pass over after death. Her higher soul longed for the body, for the nefesh part of the soul that dies with the body. And then her companions refused to let her go as well.”

“An ibbur,” Dean said.. “Had a few of those. Sometimes they possess the living and go full dybbuk.”

“The living let them, that is the danger,” agreed Anna. “The desire to keep the connection with a righteous soul can be overwhelming for the survivors. But it is unnatural for a body to contain two souls. One tends to subsume the other, and corrupts itself in the process.”

“You know, this sounds like a kabbalist job,” Dean said. “I didn’t think they sent guardian angels to retrieve wayward ghosts.”

“It’s rare, but sometimes the soul has sufficient merit.”

Dean snorted. “God still likes to play favorites, I see.”

Anna smiled, although not with the conspiratorial frisson Dean was going for. Even hunted, disobedient angels couldn’t truly break away, not down to the very being. “Perhaps,” she said. “Now that we’ve been parents, with our own small piece of creation, I see how that love can preferentially shine through. I never understood it before.”

“So she’s yours?” Dean asked. “You, uh, ‘created’ her?”

“When we came down, we created the image of her in my partner, with the human and animal souls. So yes, she is of both of us, just not from the sexual reproduction you are used to.”

“But… why? You must have known it was forbidden. You disobeyed. By definition, doesn’t that make you fallen angels?”

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Anna said. “I don’t know what Cas has told you -- probably nothing -- but all three of us were from the same group of angels. Like brothers, alike in form and purpose. But over time, from different experiences we carved out differences amongst ourselves. Like personalities, our own feelings, thoughts, opinions. The upper echelon of angels have the ability to think for ourselves.”

“Yeah, that’s in the lore,” Dean said. “But you’re still never supposed to disobey.”

“But I did. Or, at least, after experiencing humanity, I came to believe that free will for angels was not disobedience. That once a certain level of awareness was achieved, the Source had released us from strict bondage. Do you understand the difference?”

Dean shifted, and drew a finger along the rocky ground below them. “Maybe. You’re saying that God wants you to be free, so by running off, you’re not really disobeying? That’s some Talmudic-level hairsplitting going on there.”

Anna laughed. “So you do understand. You pretend that your brother is the only philosophical one, Dean Winchester, but it is not true. In any case, I will say that if ever receive a direct order from the Source, of course I would still obey. It would be unthinkable not to. But that doesn’t mean the hierarchy of angels should hold sway as well. What is the harm in experiencing humanity once again? What you call the evil inclination will not overwhelm us.”

“Why the other angel, though? How’d you drag her into it?”

“We...talked. Not words like you have, which are lovely in themselves, but communicated in ways more intimate than human speech. And I spread some of that longing for humanity, for unbridled creation, to her. And we decided to fall together.”

“An angel existential crisis, great,” Dean said. “And the kid? Cas was pretty determined to smite your little abomination to dust. Why bring an innocent right into the middle of it?”

Behind him Dean heard a flutter. He turned, and in the dimming light saw that the other angel had appeared next to them, holding the baby just like before. The little girl, still at the fat wobbly stage between infant and toddler, had wavy brown hair and big hazel eyes. She did resemble her parents. Dean and Anna both pulled themselves off the broiling stone and stood up at their arrival.

“Lexi’s not an abomination,” Hannah said. “No part of her is angel. I made her one hundred percent human, and she was granted a human soul.”

Dean shot Anna a raised eyebrow at the other angel’s intensity. Anna gave a barely perceptible shrug, as if to say, _yeah,_ _she’s into it,_ and Dean had to restrain a sympathetic smile.

“Here, hold her,” Hannah insisted, and plopped the child into Dean’s astonished arms. “You’ll feel it too. Even a human kabbalist could sense that the nephilim are…wrong. Things do not align. But there’s nothing wrong with her.”

The kid wriggled in Dean’s awkward hold, and he instinctively shifted her weight to a more stable position leaning on his chest. She looked up at him with those wide eyes, sizing him up as only little kids could. Apparently the verdict was that he was harmless, because she settled into him and stuck a thumb into her mouth. Hannah was right; there was not a trace of an uncanny vibe about her.

“You’ve handled a baby before,” Anna said, surprised. “Most young unmarried men we meet act like she’s a fragile stick of dynamite that could blow off at any second.”

“I had to watch my little brother a lot around this age. Muscle memory, I guess,” Dean said.

“Can you tell? Can you tell she’s human?” Hannah anxiously asked.

“Look, lady, it’s not like I’ve ever ran into a nephil, so how am I supposed to know?” Dean protested. But then, softening up, he added, “Seems pretty normal to me.”

“Yes, she does,” a familiar voice said behind them.

All three of them swung around to see Cas standing there, watching them. He hadn’t ditched his body — a guilty relief to Dean — or even the coat, despite the pitiless heat. His face was more lined though, stressed.

Hannah let out a small squeak and darted in front of Dean, who tightened his embrace and took a step back. Both of them simultaneously sensed that the child was safer in his arms than her mother’s, even though the angel had better means to flee. Castiel was simply less likely to impulsively strike with Dean standing there.

Anna was the only one to step forward, to confront Cas. “Examine the child before destroying her, brother,” she said. “Surely you were not given orders allowing you to harm humans.”

“No. But can the offspring of an embodied angel possibly be human? You rebelled and fell. By definition, you are tainted with yetzer hara.”

“And yetzer hatov, too,” countered Anna. “We had neither before, only pure obedient will. Now we are more, not merely corrupted. Look at yourself as well, _Castiel,_ before you cast judgment. Anyone can see how close to the precipice you are.”

Cas flinched at the verbal use of the Name, and then strode past her towards Dean without saying another word. Dean wondered what cliff he was in danger of falling off of.

“I told you to remain in the Temple,” Cas told Dean.

“Yeah, well, the kohanim weren’t happy with my debased tattooed ass dirtying up their precious inner sanctum. Drop me in a bar next time if you want to stay put.” The baby whimpered as he spoke, perhaps remembering the previous day, but Dean clung tight to her, and she buried her face in his shirt. “What’s your move here, Cas? You know I’m not going to stand by and let you kill a kid.”

Cas didn’t respond. Instead he reached out a hand, gently, and placed it on top of the girl’s curly head. She rolled her eyes up to watch him, an oddly trusting gesture for a child her age. Dean froze in place, mentally praying that this wasn’t going to end in tragedy. The mothers didn’t flinch either. Perhaps they knew that there was no easy escape, and they had to rely on an act of mercy.

After ten long seconds, Cas lifted off his hand. “The child has a human soul,” he said, surprised. “She is bound to Asiyah through an animal soul, and cannot escape to the upper realms.”

“I did not want a nephilim,” Hannah said softly. “I wanted a child of the physical realm, without our power or obligations.”

“She is more cut off from the Lord,” Cas said.

“Just like the other humans, she must create her own path,” Anna countered. “All we wanted was the privilege to raise an ordinary human child. She has access to Beriah sometimes, though her dreams and through us, but otherwise is an ordinary child.”

“I still have orders to return you to your proper station,” Cas said. “You are _malachim._ You cannot disobey your duties.”

Anna and Hannah glanced at each other, some final agreement passing between them. “We have the capacity to disobey, Castiel. What is falling, anyway? Becoming human? Why is that the end of the world? It is all choices, good actions and and amoral ones. You either improve the lot of the world, or you do not. Can we not visit the Earth for a while, to know it intimately, without falling into a state of utter degradation? This isn’t the world before the Flood. We all learned our lesson there. Even the humans, although they barely remember it. Even God.”

“You cannot disobey,” Cas insisted.

Dean almost wanted to shake him, scream, _stop being a damn angel for a minute and listen._ Following orders wasn’t everything in life. Sometimes you had to go with your own gut. Somehow the other angels had absorbed this lesson of humanity, although how they could break with their earlier programming was still an metaphysical mystery to Dean.

Anna almost seemed as disappointed as Dean. “We can disobey. Unlike the lower angels, we do have free will, even if we are not accustomed to using it. In the upper realms it seems inevitable, unthinkable to divert from God’s will. But here, there is separation. That is His great gift to humanity.”

“Will you return?” Cas pressed. “You may be able to disobey, but I cannot.”

“You will not,” said Hannah sadly. She glanced at her partner again, and whole worlds flowed between them. Dean wondered if they had given up on privacy and were communicating through the angelic means, which could be overheard by the whole celestial sphere. Then Anna nodded at her.

“We do not wish to be chased all of our days, brother. We wish our child to live in peace. If you insist, we will give up these bodies and return with you — on one condition. That you leave our little girl alone, without differentiating her from the other humans. There is no reason to pursue her. Leave her as our small permanent mark upon the world.”

Dean was already shaking his head at the foolishness. Why capitulate so easily? He’d never understand the damn angels and their obsession with following orders. But then again, he’d never had the prospect of an eternity soaked in God’s unending light, either. Was this what happened to people in the World to Come? Some folks seemed to long for it, but Dean was simply repelled.

But Cas was already agreeing to the bargain: “Yes. That is acceptable. Leave the products of Asiyah in Asiyah.”

“She’s not a damn product, she’s a person,” Dean snapped. “How can you do this, Cas? Orphan a kid without her parents? Can I just say, from personal experience, that this doesn’t turn out well.”

“You turned out fine, Dean,” Cas said, although Dean scoffed and rolled her eyes. “She does not belong with them. Not without the death of the body, and that is a separate fate from the angels.”

“We have one other request, though,” Anna said. “Give us through the day of rest to be with her. It will not affect the outcome of your mission in any way to give us a bare instant of time. Please.”

Dean was sure Cas would refuse after all the time they’d spent chasing these two down. It seemed an obvious ruse to run. But maybe the angels had their own sense of promises and honor, for Cas nodded his head in agreement.

“Through the seventh day. That is all,” he said.

  



	9. Da'at

_**Da’at** \- Unification, the blend of intellect and emotions, concentration, recognition, perspective, security. To know._

 

“Think for yourself, Cas!” Dean shouted, pacing the room. Cas had beamed them back to the room in Boston — now back on only Thursday morning. That bought Hannah and Anna a few more hours of time. Two and a half days before they’d agreed to give themselves up to Cas, the authoritarian cop in the sky.

Dean was determined that it would never happen.

“You angels are eternal,” he argued. “So what’s the big deal with taking a few decades of vacation every once in awhile? Enjoy your body, see the sights. It’ll help you make better decisions to get know humanity a little bit more intimately.”

“It is against our nature, Dean,” Cas said back. Not in his normal placid tone, but urgent, almost angry. The strain of the past few days was somehow getting to him as well. Dean could only hope that was progress. “We do not make decisions. We do not pass judgment. We only obey and act.”

“Oh, fuck that nature business. Are you kidding? The lore is filled with the opinions of the angels.”

“Yes, but our opinions reflect that of our creator,” Cas said. “We are but extensions of His will.”

“How do you _know_ that?” Dean insisted. “Does God come down and give you angel pep talks? How do you know it's not reflexive at this point, that you get a command from on high and mindlessly follow it? Maybe nobody’s at the reins, Cas. Maybe the world has been on autopilot a long time.”

“If you were an angel, if you could venture to Beriah or above, you would know,” Cas said. “The light — it fills everything, permeates every being and will with purpose and perfection. I do not understand how Anael could dare to mar that light. Only down here do I feel…”

He cut off and and looked away, and seemed to need to compose himself. But for once, Dean didn’t wasn’t willing to let him off the hook.

“Feel what, Cas? You’ve been down here before. Your light pattern and Name are on record. What’s so different about this trip, that has you freaked out and ditching me for hours while you consult with your bosses? You can’t even make it a week in this body? Try twenty-seven years, dude. What gives?”

“You know nothing else, so you have nothing to compare it to,” Cas countered. “But this body... Every other time I have been commanded to come down to Asiyah, the body was merely a tool. A means to an end, and a thing I controlled as you control a hoe in your hand. But now it is like the hoe has its own will reflecting back, imposing itself on my true form.”

“They’re just natural impulses, Cas. Nothing to be afraid of, a taste of being human. Besides, you’ll be back to your ephemeral self in no time, so you may as well chill and enjoy it.”

Cas didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he reached out his hand to cover the distance between them, and ran his fingertips over the edges of Dean’s lips. Dean didn’t flinch, but closed his eyes and let Cas explore through the unforeseen contact. It suddenly struck him how similar this situation was to some of his hookups, the unexpected encounters where a guy lingers too long in eye contact or casual touch, and betrays his latent attraction. Dean himself kept a tight lid on all such signals out in the mundane world, but when they came his way, so long as the dude wasn’t completely repulsive he never, ever rebuffed them. It was too rare an occasion, and a bravery that deserved its own reward.

But Cas’s issue wasn’t that he was attracted to a forbidden taboo sex, it was that he was attracted to _anyone_ at all. The fact that he’d somehow picked Dean out of all the world’s choices— a disreputable, corrupting pervert that nobody would ever take home to meet their parents for dinner — made it hot as fuck.

Dean reached out in return, and gently ran his hand down from Cas’s jaw to the back of his neck. Cas gazed back at him, his face broadcasting a poignant mixture of longing and terror and guilt. Dean had seen that same expression in front of him so many times. He’d probably had it plastered on his own face once upon a time. So he took the responsibility for decision-making off his hesitant partner by pulling him forward for a kiss.

Cas let him take action at first without responding, feeling out what Dean was doing instead. But with tender coaxing, he got Cas to slowly open up. He was a good student, imitating Dean’s movements but also savoring it at the same time. Cas edged towards him, and they leaned together so that their entire upper bodies were rested on each other, rubbing, seeking each others’ body heat.

Often at this stage Dean went straight for the pants and groin, but something about Cas’s tentative explorations — his innocence, maybe — told him that Cas needed touch more than anything, and before anything else as well. So instead he barely paused in the kissing to run his hands up Cas’s chest squeezed between them, and began to unbutton his collared shirt. He got as far as running his palms along Cas’s collarbone before Cas suddenly broke off, but remained leaning against Dean’s forehead, breathing hard.

“I cannot go further. It is forbidden,” Cas murmured.

“What’s forbidden? Kissing someone? Touching? You touched me before and it wasn’t forbidden,” Dean said just as softly, breathing in Cas’s own breath. After ten years of seducing nervous yeshiva boys, Dean could do legal wrangling.

“Sexual contact with a human,” Cas said. “This is the behavior that led to the nephilim all those eons ago.” His eyelids staying fluttered down, but now he reached up and grasped Dean by the back of the neck, very much as Dean had done to him moments before.

“Wellll,” Dean breathed, “unless you’ve got some magic angel womb I don’t know about, no little abominations are going to come of this today. Good job picking a male form?”

Cas actually cracked half a smile at that, possibly his first, which only made him look more human and hotter than ever. “If I had known you would enjoy it so much, I would not have, as you say, ‘picked’ it.”

“There’s your problem right there. You’ve only got two days left to enjoy the Earth, and you spend it wishing you had done something less provocative. Hit all the physical desires, Cas. Eat, drink, sleep, make love. What could go wrong?”

Cas leaned to one side to whisper in his ear. “I could fall. Just like Anna and Hannah.”

There it was, the act that he was really afraid of. What it meant to him, Dean did not know. Was this a permanent state of irredeemable exile, like Adam and Eve in the garden? Would he turn into a caricature of evil, like a demigod from the myths of primitive lands? Would the other holy angels weep if Castiel cracked, and send another one of their own to hunt him down? Can a fallen angel ever go back?

Dean leaned back so he could focus on all of Cas’s face, but continued to stroke his cheeks with his palm. “Those girls have been here two years and have a kid, and yet they still agreed to go back with you. That’s what free will means, Cas. It means you can always change your mind all over again. If you really want me to walk away, I will. But if you want to know what it’s like to touch and lick and maybe fuck someone for hours, someone who’s really into you, then choose to do it. Stop dicking around with all this guilt about how you are breaking the rules.”

“Teach me, Dean,” Cas whispered.

 _Fucking amen,_ thought Dean, but outwardly he only grinned back into the kiss.

Dean made good on his promise. He always did.

He stripped Cas slowly, back down to that primal nude body he’d seen a week ago in the fire. First standing there, together, letting him get comfortable enough to roam his own hands over Dean. It turned out Cas was more enthusiastic than Dean anticipated, given his sometimes deadpan cold demeanor. But he didn’t seem to have inhibitions either. Just a bit hesitant, letting Dean take the lead and copy every one of his movements.

He kissed Cas’s neck, and Cas arched up in response, then rolled his head to one side and sucked on Dean’s neck right back. He wandered the kisses down Cas’s prettily defined chest, and was rewarded with a similar move in kind. He ran his tongue just inside Cas’s lips, and received warm exploration in exchange.

“Come,” Dean said, tugging Cas over to the bed. “Come, come, come.” He didn’t know what he was chanting for.

At first they did nothing but lie next to each other, kiss and rub hard into each other. Skin, and lots of it, was Dean’s main thought. He thought about making Cas come quickly, and then repeating it over and over, under the assumption that his fine new body could rebound like a teenager. But then, with the angel actually mimicking his every stroke and caress, he wanted to prolong it. Like putty in his hands. And then Dean realized that the replication didn’t end with Cas’s motions, but that he was keeping pace with his strokes, and the exact same level of rapid breathing and arching into each other.

“Wait,” he whispered, when they were close. “Not…not yet.”

“You want something,” Cas whispered back. ‘Tell me what you want and I will do it, Dean.”

“I know.”

Dean let go of Cas and sat up. “I’ve never done this before. Could end in hilarious disaster. But God I want to feel you while we do this. As much of you as possible.”

He reached over and dug into his crumpled jeans laying on one side of the bed, and pulled out another tiny pack of lube. Yet again, it never hurt to be prepared. Would Cas even know what it signified, or care? He decided it couldn’t possibly matter. What was one sex act over another to an immortal, disembodied creature?

“You wish to be penetrated,” Cas intoned. “Like the other night.”

“I knew you were spying on me,” Dean complained, but it was with a smile. “Not exactly like the other night, although we can do it that way if this goes down in flames. You wanna try something new, right?”

“I want to see you have pleasure,” Cas murmured. “I’m surprised how pleasant that is, to cause it another person.”

“Everything’s more fun when you do it together,” Dean said.

He leaned over to kiss him again, pulling him up in the process. He crossed his legs, and manually helped Cas into position, in his lap, legs wrapped around him. Good thing the angel was flexible. His cock pressed against Dean’s belly, while Dean’s own was practically shoved underneath. It was as intimate as expected, as if they were almost merging together, skin to skin. But that same sense of a key fitting into a lock made it impossible to move or maneuver. Dean couldn’t help it, but began to laugh. And in response, Cas too was smiling.

“This isn’t working as I planned,” Dean said, between chuckles. “Probably why getting fucked off the side of a bed is a classic, while getting cock-squashed in someone’s lap isn’t.”

Without replying, Cas began to rock. And without mentioning what he was doing, he shifted a leg so he could reach down under them with a palm, and squeezed. His hand glowed warm, and Dean suddenly had to loll his head back at the surge of pleasure.

“Wha…what is tha…”

“Shh, I’m experimenting too,” Cas said, and craned his neck to cut off Dean’s mouth with a kiss.

The mystery angel move was unendurable, and also amazing. Dean wrapped his arms around Cas’s back, digging his nails in as they rocked together. Dean had no idea how the two of them were keeping their balance up, but it felt as if they couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, could only incrementally shift against that lovely skin and heat and drive to come. And he could feel Cas bucking into him, equally taken. When they came together, Den could have sworn he felt them both exploding in pleasure and light and love.

Afterward, Dean could barely move, still locked into Cas’s embrace with his weight in his lap. Their arms were still mutually wrapped around each other, holding on as if the other might fly apart. He buried his face in Cas’s neck breathing hard, trying to grasp what he’d just experienced.

“What was that?” he murmured into Cas’s ear, after a moment when composure was again possible. “What…I never felt…”

“You felt a piece of Yetzirah through me,” Cas murmured back, “just as I lived through Asiyah. The Worlds are never not linked. We might be able to ascend all the way to Beriah if we try.”

“Good to have a goal,” Dean muttered, the wind squashed out of him.

For the first time in his body Castiel laughed, just like a human, and Dean never felt such love.

  



	10. Hochmah

_**Hochmah** \- Wisdom, spark of intellect, potential, selflessness, knowingness, intuition. Source of the soul._

 

As he drifted back up from sleep, wrapped up in Cas’s arms with the angel half on top of him, Dean noticed the odd dreams. Dreams were always windows both into a person’s inner mind and up into the upper realms, but the contact was always a fleeting vision, the barest taste of the realms of the angels. Sometimes, when doing extended meditation for a spell, Dean could sense something else, a gateway beyond with a vividness not accessible in a dream, but that too always floated away as the manifest world came back into focus. Usually it was an ineffable sensation, not an actual vision.

But in contact with Cas, Dean finally understood the meaning of divine light.

He experienced it first as undifferentiated brightness, so endless and pure it couldn’t be described as white or daylight, but merely the spotless absence of darkness. It wasn’t a reality to be sensed through the eyes or brain, since on any actual place on Earth it would fry both. There were no emotions, no knowledge, no self. Simply infinite space infused with a single unrelenting will.

But out of that, gradually there was more. Faint at first, but then gradually brighter as they came into focus. In the dream Dean saw it as a colors, the same rainbow that Sam cataloged every time they chased down an angel. Each one was merely a thread in an tapestry without end, the edges of them barely discernible from the whole. Each one knew its place and function, and moved as one with all the others.

Except a few. The occasional thread, a rainbow riot in themselves when you zoomed in, kinked out of place. Not even hanging like a stray fiber to be snipped off, but merely a wrinkle in an otherwise smooth harmonious whole.

Dean sensed himself beyond the tapestry, an alien interloper, an observer. And he reached out and tugged on one the threads, and pulled it loose.

Back in the room, in his body, he opened his eyes, and found Cas already awake, staring at him. Not with fear or anxiety, but with calm love.

“Ya…okay?” Dean slurred, struggling to bring himself out of the vision. “Was that real?”

“In a sense. You saw what your mind interpreted. A part of the human soul ascends when you sleep.”

“Think I knew that.” Dean propped his head up on his hand. “Are you in trouble now, Cas? Feel like you’ve been ripped out of your real self and home?”

“I feel… as I imagine a human feels like. Everything in front of me is unknown.”

Dean traced a finger around Cas’s ear, down to his jawline. “Does that mean you’ve…decided to go full human? Or are still on the fence, and want to spend the next day and a half making out like rabbits while tormenting yourself over your celestial duties?” He leaned over and kissed the same jaw that he’d been stroking, and felt Cas relax under his lips. “Oh no, I’m disobeying my comrades!” he said in a mock voice, and kissed his neck. “Oh shit, where’s my mission sheet again?”

“You do have a way with annoying words,” Cas said.

“It’s a gift. Seriously, though, there are two other angels who’d like to know about this change of heart. You’re not really going to drag them back now, are you? I mean, the least you can do is look the other way while they run.”

“Running is not a very good option,” Cas said seriously. “I would prefer not to run, either. It would be futile if the full weight of heaven were pressed to our return.”

“Well, how many angels are they going to send after your wayward asses? They could have sent an army, right when Anna and Hannah fell. But they didn’t. They waited two years, and got you into it. Or God did, I guess, I’m a little unclear on who issues your marching orders.”

“There is a hierarchy,” Cas said. “But ultimately, it derives from the infinite light. The higher angels have no more free will than the lower, simply more of an independent intelligence. But…”

He cut off, and the confused look replaced the formerly serene features. “But what?” Dean prompted gently. “Gotta use your words if you want to be human, Cas.”

“You are correct. The circumstances of this mission were unusual, and not self-explanatory. And I believe I told you at the beginning that I was told to find you by Name. Not your brother who would have been equally functional.”

“Oh yeah. So why do you think they wanted me to tag along? Maybe someone up there wanted you to be perverted to my side.”

He meant it as a joke, but as soon as the words left his mouth, Cas sat up, astonished. “That is not an unreasonable conclusion based on events,” he said.

“I was kidding, Cas. I don’t think God is playing gay matchmaker.”

“Everything that emerges from Atzilut has a purpose, Dean. Actions here in Asiyah may be random or chaotic, but we do not operate from a flawed source.”

“I thought all of Creation was flawed. ‘You can never complete the task, but neither may you abstain from it.’ All that stuff, was that just propaganda to whip humanity into better shape? Make us behave closer to the angels?”

“I do not know anymore,” Cas said quietly. “But I do know I cannot fault Anael and Anayel for the very same flaws that I am now laying here with you for.”

“Might want to get out of bed and tell them, then.”

“I used their Names. They already know,” Castiel said.

They lay there quietly, Dean’s mind going back and forth between confusion and calm. He could stay here, he realized, right here in another man’s arms, for as long as they both enjoyed it. He didn’t have to fuck and run away, and tell himself that those fleeting contacts were all for the best. He could learn to fall in love, not just flit from pleasure to pleasure. The thought really hadn’t occurred to Dean before. If an angel could goddamned fall for him — give up angelhood in exchange for the human — he could be fully human too.

“I’m not really giving up being an angel,” Cas said softly, running his fingers over Dean’s cheeks, down to his lips.

“Dude, are you going to tell me your telepathic now too?” Dean laughed.

“Not always. You were thinking of us, and the thought came across like a prayer.”

Dean couldn’t resist kissing him then, all while thinking hard: _Hear, O’ Castiel, O’ Holy Thunderous One._

“You really are very sacrilegious for a human, Dean,” Cas said, as Dean released his lips and grinned.

“The power of free will, baby.  I bet all you angels sit up there lounging around the Throne of Glory, comparing notes on the most ridiculous prayer you got that day.”

Cas looked perplexed. “Why would we mock people’s sincere communications with the upper Worlds?”

“Because it’s fun…Oh, never mind. What did you mean, you’re not giving up being an angel? This whole ‘falling’ business isn’t real?”

“It is real, but it is not…permanent. Even the angels can ask for forgiveness, and repent.  No one is wholly fallen. Even if I stay, even if I ‘fall’, I can always return home. Perhaps I will choose to do so after you are gone.”

“The great shofar is sounded, and a still, thin voice is heard. Even the angels cry out in dismay, for the day of judgment is near,” Dean quoted.

“And sometimes you are a very surprising human,” Cas said.

“Hey, even I can remember things on the thousandth repetition. Sam’s not the only one who’s had to memorize,” Dean scoffed. “Speaking of, we should probably make a showing back at Torat Or. Explain the situation, let Sam know we’re okay. You might get pelted with theological questions, though. It’s not everyday you get to have a Shabbat dinner argument with a real live angel.”

“They should not have high expectations for answers. It has been made clear that the era of divine revelation has ended.”

“Well, you can’t blame us for trying. Do you know, Cas? What’s the point in all of…this?” He waved a hand in the vague direction of the ether. “Why this universe, this way? Why angels and demons and Worlds and holy letters and good and evil? Why should Sam and I have the job we have?”

“I cannot give you answers either, Dean. What do you believe?”

Dean just groaned and pulled a pillow over his face, before flinging it to the floor in annoyance. “All right, come on, let’s get dressed. I have a probably pissed-off brother to track down.”

“What will you tell him?”

“The truth. All the things unsaid.”


	11. Epilogue: Keter, back down to malchut

_**Keter**_ _\- Crown, breath, faith, divine will, infinite light. God._

 

The man who wasn’t a man walked along a rocky beach, the pooling salt water frigid on his feet despite the pleasant summer air. His angel was near, huddled for warmth and enjoying the elements with his human lover, and the man who wasn’t a man had to take care to withdraw himself further into this cramped form, lest his angel catch a glimpse of his undisciplined Light. The effort was minimal, for only the smallest fraction of his being was currently embodied in this particular form.

He could choose to experience everything that Dean and Castiel experienced, of course, directly from each and every microparticle that made up their bodies, and each and every wave of divine energy that made up their souls. But there was something appealing in the observation from afar. The perspective of Asiyah was appropriate for the task.  Castiel was leaning his shoulder against Dean’s, not quite drooping his head, with an expression of calm absorption, as the wind whipped the hair around his face. Dean had an expression of slight disbelief, as if joy was difficult to come by, and he did not quite believe his good fortune and was struggling to make sense of it.

Good. His angel was no longer the befuddled one, at least at this moment. Acceptance had arrived.

He should properly no longer call Castiel “his” angel, but ancient habits died hard. And Castiel was not yet completely of this realm, so there was quite a lot of angel in him still yearning to ascend. He hadn’t fallen completely. He might not ever let go, and choose to return to his old form if someday he wearied of Earth.

Either way, the man who was not a man would be pleased. Infant steps. His angels could only be led so far.

Dean noticed they were being watched, as humans were prone to do. Always aware of the social, his humans. Dean scowled to cover up nervousness for his perceived transgressions, and made direct eye contact with his form.

“Take a picture, it will last longer,” Dean told him.

The man who was not a man smiled at them. “You make a cute couple,” he made the form say.

Dean’s eyes widened in surprise. Castiel watched his form curiously, and then rested his hand on top of Dean’s, who flushed but did not withdraw it.

“Yes,” said Castiel. “We are a very attractive couple.”

“Oh my _God_ , Cas, shut up,” Dean said. “You’ve got to learn when to shut it, bro.”

“I believe the expression is, ‘make me’,” Castiel replied.

The man who was not a man smiled even wider, and continued his path along the beach.

  



End file.
